by Brandt Legg
Wen didn’t know if the message had gotten through to him. Either way, she could not be slowed. Her purpose went beyond Chase, even if it hadn’t started out that way. Before she could completely disappear, Wen needed a special piece of equipment. There were exactly eleven people in the world who could provide it. One in Panama, three in the United States, one in the Netherlands, three in China, two elsewhere in Asia, and one, as luck would have it, in Canada. At least she hoped he was still in Edmonton.
If she couldn’t find him, she might have to risk crossing into the United States. Getting into the country was the easy part, not including the border with Alaska. There were more than two thousand miles, much of it wilderness, in which she could slip across. The problem was finding one of the “astronauts,” as the eleven were known, without first being detected by US officials or one of the many MSS located in the States, a risk she hoped would not be necessary. However, she’d only learned after the download on Port Hardy that she’d need one of the astronauts. As the miles rolled by, Wen realized the biggest enemy now wasn’t the MSS, it was time.
The Consulate of the Peoples Republic of China, in San Francisco, occupied a white marble-facade building on Laguna Street. It had the appearance of an old prison. A pair of stone imperial guardian lions flanked the main entrance. Deep inside the bureaucratic complex, a hardened MSS station filled six large rooms containing monitoring equipment, an interrogation space, and meeting areas. Rong Lo, impatient for updates on the whereabouts of either Wen or Chase, logged into the MSS master server. Time to review the data dumped from his visit to the BE headquarters several days earlier.
“We’ll see what’s going on in your confused little world,” Lo mumbled to Chase in the ethers. “Everyone leaves a digital trail, even tech geniuses.” Lo laughed at the characterization. He believed all billionaires were simply talented thieves, that the word “genius” was thrown around almost as much as the word “awesome”—all original meaning lost in their dissipation.
Rong Lo’s fingers began to move more urgently across the keys, pecking out codes and strings of commands and passwords long committed to memory. Something’s wrong, he thought as he moved into new directories and repeated several complex steps, as if searching for a missing child on a crowded street.
“Where is it?” he raged. The data had vanished. The tracks remained. He could see when it had come in, the space it had occupied, and . . . its exit. “Damn her!”
He knew immediately Wen Sung had gotten in and deleted what he had stolen from BE’s servers. How she had done it? While on the run? While in hiding? While ruining my life? The MSS agent-access servers were among the most secure on earth. She had to have had help. Someone on the inside is working with you. You foolish girl, that will only make it easier for me to find you.
“I’m going to kill you, Wen Sung, slowly and painfully,” he suddenly said out loud, “but not before making you watch your boyfriend die.”
Thirty-Seven
Chase spent the next thirty minutes filling in his new security boss on everything he knew about Franco Madden, GlobeTec, Porter, the MSS, Rong Lo, and, reluctantly, Wen, while managing to eat the stir-fry Dez had left. For his part, Flint recited a brief bio on himself. He was former CIA, fifty-six years old, but in better shape, at least physically, than most people twenty-years younger.
“I’ve got two kids older than you,” he told Chase while fixing a pot of gourmet brew in the motel room’s “fancy” coffee maker.
“Not sure that makes me feel safer,” Chase said.
“Don’t worry. I’ve also got contacts. Folks I’ve been in the heat with . . . people still with the company.”
Chase knew he meant active CIA agents. “Do you know Tess Federgreen? Ever hear of CISS?”
Flint said no, but for some reason Chase wasn’t convinced of his answer. When Chase explained his encounter with Tess on the tarmac and her warning, he didn’t think Flint asked enough questions, but before he could push harder, Flint's phone rang. He checked the number and then handed it to Chase. “Call for you. It’s Mars.”
Chase took the phone. “Hello?”
“Chase, did you get the envelope I sent?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Good. That’s not why I’m calling,” Mars began. “I’ve heard an awful lot of unpleasant reports. Seems there’s a man named Franco Madden who doesn’t like you much. He’s the head of security for GlobeTec, parent company of TruNeural, the firm who bought RAI and your patents.”
“How do you hear this stuff, Mars?” he asked, having only told him about the MSS.
“You know there’s close to two and a half million people in the prisons and jails in this country. That’s an awful lot of people, and it means that convicts are never more than four degrees of separation between anyone in America. There’s a prison network where information is bought, sold, and traded that the CIA would be envious of. In fact, they actually use it from time to time.”
“Some convicts in a random prison know about GlobeTec coming after me? And it filtered back to you?”
“The network is how I manage to be so successful running my business on the outside from the inside. I learned pretty quick how powerful information is, and I guess there aren’t too many others who are keyed into the network more than me. But enough about all that, I’m calling because now I realize you need more than Flint Jones to protect you.”
Franco pressed his palm into the biosensor pad at the door to “Central,” a core space on what would normally have been the fifth floor of the TruNeural building. However, the sixth floor had been labeled the fifth, the sixth was really the seventh, and so on. All the effort had been made so that the real fifth floor would not ever be noticed, or rather what was going on there would never be questioned. Franco had already typed in a special access code which allowed the elevator to stop on the “invisible” floor. GlobeTec’s security chief passed through a hall of lasers which identified him with 99.7789% accuracy. Finally, he was admitted to Central, a vast space that more closely resembled a modern hospital than a high-tech center.
Sliske stood waiting next to a giant glass enclosed maze, about twice the size of the one at GlobeTec’s Chairman’s Manhattan office.
Franco noticed Sliske’s usual immaculately parted hair, razor-cut to fall in perfect place, was disheveled. “How are the mice doing today?”
“Better than me,” Sliske said as another furry white creature escaped the electronic trap TruNeural’s CEO had set. “Their progress is fantastic! I haven’t been able to fry one yet, and it’s not just milliseconds, they’re blowing past full seconds, it’s like they know where the lasers are going to appear. These results are a multiple of three over yesterday’s.”
“At that rate,” Franco responded dryly, “by tomorrow the little mice will break out of their maze prison and kill us all.”
Sliske took his eyes off the mice for only a moment and flashed a look at the security chief, as if to say, ‘You may be joking, but I think it’s possible.’
“‘Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed,’” Franco began, quietly reciting the first sentence to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, “‘in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.’”
“What are you babbling about?” Sliske asked irritably while pounding buttons, as if the force of his finger would somehow make the timing more accurate and ensnare a mouse in a blue flash.
“Nothing that matters, apparently.” He smiled, holding a toothpick between his two front teeth.
“Today is the day,” Sliske said, with as much happiness as he was capable, certainly as much as Franco had ever seen him display. “We’re suiting up two for you.” He threw his hands up, as if the entire game of mice had become a waste of time.
“Yes,” Franco said, far less enthused than his co-conspirator. He did believe, howev
er, that the project would benefit him in finding and ending Chase Malone. Yet, to his thinking, the method was madness. “I’ve read the case histories. 0630 and 0830 seem competent,” he said, referring to the codenames of the two new agents assigned to him. “I have to say, though, I’m concerned with the unknown.”
“Don’t be,” Sliske said, leading Franco down the long central corridor. “Was Neil Armstrong scared?”
“With all due respect, what we’re about to unleash on the world is more complex and heavier with risk—a million times more perilous than the first walk on the moon.”
“So it is,” Sliske said. He opened the door to a brightly lit lab full of workers donned in cleanroom anti-contamination suits. “Once you understand how the RAIN CHIPs work, you’ll never worry again . . . about anything.”
Thirty-Eight
Tess Federgreen answered the phone. “Well, Flint Jones, a ghost from the past . . . how are you?”
“Can’t complain, Tess. And you?” Flint said, trying to sound casual.
“Busy, good . . . ”
“Same as always,” they said simultaneously and laughed.
“I was sorry to hear about Claire,” she said, turning serious again. “I meant to call.”
“An unlikely event, a difficult time, but—”
“And how are Jenny and Aidan?”
“Excellent.” He paused. “Jenny’s married now.”
“Where does the time go?” Tess asked, surprised.
“Yeah, the wedding was in Taos. The night before, I actually wandered into the Sagebrush Inn, half expecting to see you two-stepping to Michael Hearne or the Rifters.”
“Remember Eddie Lee? No one could sing like him. I do still get out to Santa Fe and Taos when I can. You know me. Dusty cowboys, a mandolin riff, a fire of piñon and cedar . . . ”
“I do recall.”
“Why’d Jenny have her wedding in Taos?”
“She married a man from Albuquerque.”
“Hmm,” Tess said, before a brief silence. “But you’re calling—out of the blue—for a reason.”
“I want to know about CISS.”
“Of course you do,” Tess said with a slight laugh. “I can’t tell you anything.”
“Of course you can’t.”
“Who are you working for now?”
Flint knew Tess would be able to find out on her own in about three minutes, so he told her. “Chase Malone.”
“Of course you are.” She laughed again. “I may have underestimated young Chase.”
“He’s in a bit of a spot.”
“I’ll say he is.”
“Are you going to make my job more difficult, Tess?”
“Oh, that doesn’t sound like me, does it?”
“Actually, it kind of does.”
“Really? Hmmm. You can make it easy on yourself. Keep your boy away from GlobeTec.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“It’s that big?”
“Bigger.”
“According to what you told Chase, CISS is on the front line of the new world order—stopping the corporations from replacing the nations-states. You and I both know the corporations have been in control for a long time. Why go to so much trouble to hide the truth?”
“It’s the illusion of freedom that prevents anarchy.”
“I don’t believe that, and neither do you.”
“But I do,” Tess said. “My charge is to protect the American way of life. It’s not as easy as it once was. You’ve been out of the game a while. Every day is more complex.”
“Chase is a good guy, Tess. He doesn’t deserve to get caught up in the empire.”
“Good guys sometimes become heroes, and other times martyrs. Looks like you’ll get to determine which one Chase turns out to be. You know enough to know how it works. Be very careful on this one, Flint. You’re a good guy, too.”
“Is that a veiled threat?” Flint asked, surprised.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to be veiled,” Tess said. “I’m late for a meeting. Good luck. Hope we meet on a dance floor again sometime.”
She was gone before he could say goodbye. Suddenly Michael Hearne’s song, “Ghost,” began playing in his head.
Running scared
Lying low
Praying hard
the wind don’t blow me into
a direction of precarious perfection
I thought I spied a ghost behind my door . . .
Thirty-Nine
Chase took the call from his assistant, knowing it must be important since he’d given her instructions not to bother him. Dez or Adya could handle any issue, and there were a dozen executives below them who would make sure the business continued to hum. As he touched the phone’s screen to accept, Chase had no idea that the call would change his life.
His assistant told him the cryptic message from Wen. She wanted him to return to Canada, this time to meet in Edmonton. The Vancouver massacre flashed in his mind. He wondered if she knew Twag was dead. Even with the reluctance and fear he felt about jumping back into the horrors, excitement overtook him at the prospect of finally seeing Wen again. Up until that moment, he hadn’t known if she was still alive. Helping Wen escape not just from whatever was making her run, but especially from the evil Rong Lo, made him willing to do absolutely anything.
After the call, in a moment of reflection, Rong Lo’s vicious eyes invaded his psyche. An instant later, Twag’s dying eyes replaced them. He’d have to take Flint Jones, and probably more. But more was too risky. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, he thought. Then, thinking about Flint winding up like Bob and Dave, he suddenly felt sick, as if kicked in the gut when hungover. Mars had suggested Flint should hire a team to deal with the Franco threat. “Throw serious money at it,” he’d said. But he now had something bigger in mind for the MSS.
Chase told his assistant to book a bus ticket to Sacramento and a flight out of Sacramento to Vancouver in his name. She’d been puzzled by the instructions, and wondered why he wouldn’t use the corporate jet. Although she wasn’t privy to all that was going on, she knew a lot was going on, and did not question it.
After tossing his belongings into a carry-on bag, including the contents of the envelope Mars had sent him, Chase phoned Flint with his plan. He arranged with the front desk for a courtesy shuttle to the airport, then went back to work coding the AI Anecdote.
Once at the airport, Chase found the next flight to Edmonton, departing in three hours and ten minutes, and booked it. Mars had been prophetic in sending him a new identity, but Chase still worried that the passport, credit card, and drivers’ license Beltracchi had provided might not hold up to scrutiny. He had to know. A cross-border trial run into Canada would be a good test.
Chase nervously stepped though the magnetometer. He had not taken a commercial flight in years. His corporate jet, a Gulfstream G650ER, had been his first big splurge as a newly minted billionaire. He’d always wanted his own plane, and he didn’t mind paying nearly $70 million for a fully customized version of the model that many considered the best made. But now he was back in the world of mere mortals and he felt like cattle—lines, procedures, security checks, and rules, lots of rules. Any moment he expected to be busted for the forged papers and dragged off to a concrete room with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. So when the magnetometer beeped loudly as he passed through it, and a burly TSA agent ushered him aside, he thought it was all over.
“Hold your arms straight out to your sides,” the agent said. “I’m going to have to pat you down.”
Chase did as he was told, his bogus passport clutched in his hand.
A second later, the agent found something in his coat pocket. “What’s this?” the agent asked and then, without waiting for an answer, added, “Please remove it from your pocket, slowly.”
The agent stood back, made a quick gesture, and two other agents suddenly appeared.
Confused, Chase pulled his multi-to
ol from his pocket. He’d forgotten it was in there, since he always carried it and, on his jet, he could bring a machine gun if he wanted.
The agent looked at Chase as if he were an idiot. “What were your plans with this?”
“I forgot I had it.” Chase wondered if his new identity was now going to be put on a terrorist watch list, if he might be taken into custody.
“You’ll have to surrender it.”
Incredibly, Chase was about to argue the point, but caught himself. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
The other two TSA personnel returned to their nearby posts, while the original agent tested Chase’s fingers for explosive residue, sent him through the magnetometer again and made sure the woman working the conveyor took extra care rifling his carry-on, but ultimately they let him pass.
After the ordeal, Chase found a place to buy water, surprised a small cardboard container cost $5, then parked himself in an out of the way corner between gates twenty-nine and thirty in Terminal-One and resumed his coding project. He’d known since his airport hotel meeting with Dez that if he didn’t find a way to deactivate RAI, then the only way to beat the CHIPs would be to implant RAI into his own brain. Dez would try to stop him, but Chase’s determination to save humanity from his creation could not be quelled.
Forty
Franco left Central in a daze. Even with all his advance knowledge, what he’d seen buried within TruNeural’s invisible floor had stunned him, but he was happy to have two new agents in his quest to get Chase. As he drove toward the airport, he questioned the agents who Sliske had assigned ID numbers 0630 and 0830.
“I understand your enhanced abilities will continually improve as we go along,” Franco said, glancing in the rearview mirror at them.