The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  Maria wouldn’t want this.

  I stepped out of my room and into the glaringly bright daylight of the central living room. A slim, average height and very pretty redhead spun around to look at me as I sat myself on the nearest sofa and stared out the window at the morning mists. Somehow, they didn’t seem quite so beautiful anymore.

  “Good morning Marcus. How are you feeling?” the woman asked in a familiar voice.

  “I don’t know, Alice.” I answered honestly. Of course, I had seen Alice’s new body, it was – as expected – an exact recreation of the woman her face was based on; Amelia, from the original engram group, one of the minds that comprised Alice’s mainframe. “Maybe you should ask me again when we have gone through exactly what the fuck happened at Itek.”

  There was a pause as Alice sat down on the sofa opposite me, “what do you want to know?” she asked softly.

  “Everything. Who those men were, who ordered them to be there, who ordered them to…” the words froze in my throat, “…who ordered them to… Kill… Maria? I want to know how you didn’t see them; I want to know how she was left there to die – alone - when we promised her that we would get her away from there… I want to know everything!”

  Alice started laying out the details. It was, of course, General Reaves who had ordered the hit, at least according to the digital orders, but not from the military side of his job description: this was an off-the-books, plausible deniability, suspense movie bullshit, CIA operation. The three men had caught Maria off guard, bursting into her office, beating her half to death while throwing questions at her before one them – the second man I had killed that night – put a gun against her head and pulled the trigger. The one upside was that Maria had fought valiantly. It would have been obvious to her from the moment those men grabbed her that she wouldn’t be leaving that building alive, but she kicked and fought and held her head high… right to the end. Alice had the footage but refused to let me see it for a while. The killer had put a gun in her hands to make it look like a suicide and then they had ransacked the office – not looking for anything, but just to make it look like she had snapped.

  “And how exactly did you miss all of this?” I asked bluntly.

  “the virus.” She answered, her head down and her hands wringing together. “if it had shut down the security system, I would have noticed immediately, but it just looped a few seconds of footage over and over again. It showed Maria pacing in her office, and the rest of the building empty, just as I was expecting it to, if there had been any other point of reference – another person in the building, a bird flying past the window… anything - I would have picked it up. It was low tech, expertly timed and I missed it. I am so sorry.”

  The obviousness of the technique was starting to dawn on me; as much as I was looking for someone to blame, it wasn’t Alice. “So am I,” I muttered, “we were just too late.”

  “I think you need to take my mainframe offline, at least until you can confirm I am operating properly.” She said suddenly, her eyes raising to meet mine. Her eyes were a brilliant shade of green – I don’t mean hazel or any other natural eye colour, I mean a bright and vibrant shade of green normally reserved for summer grasses and children’s balloons.

  “No, Alice, it isn’t your fault. We both should have done better.”

  “that’s not what I’m talking about, Marcus…” she began, “I am concerned about my personality subroutines. I am experiencing emotions that are interfering with my operations, I seem preoccupied with Maria’s death, I can feel my moral and ethical boundaries altering when I think about the men who did this to them – I have explored over 200 methods off killing every one of them – I am… angry!”

  “Of course, you are, Alice,” I replied. “your engrams are based on human brains, and primarily on my personality. Maria was an important part of your existence and she has been taken away – you are grieving.”

  “Maria was my friend,” Alice said, her soft features turning into a scowl, “and they killed her! I want them to suffer for what they did to my friend!” It was strange talking to Alice as a person, rather than a face on a screen. Her body language was so much more expressive than her two-dimensional face had ever been and right now, her hands were balled into fists – the capabilities of which I was more than aware of – her brows were furrowed, and her jaw was clenched.

  “Alice,” she didn’t respond. “look at me, Alice.” Her brilliant green eyes rose once again to meet mine, a storm of emotion swirling through those colours. “Maria was the love of my life and she was your friend. If you think, for one second, that I am going to allow those people to get away with what they did to her, then maybe I should take you apart. I meant every word of what I said to Benson – we are coming for them… and when we find them... They will be kept alive just long enough to regret what they did to her.”

  Alice nodded with a look of grim determination.

  “Now we have work to do.”

  Lieutenant McCleary walked through his front door and into the small living room kitchen area that made up over half of his small single bedroom house. Living off base had its benefits - the rows of weight benches, treadmills and other fitness machines of his own private gym being one of them – although being assigned to Fort Benning, in the heart of rural Georgia, was fairly prestigious in its own right.

  McCleary was officially a member of the 75th Rangers, although recent secondments to the CIA had boosted his income significantly, more than that, active field assignments and live mission experience was the fastest way to break in to Delta force – the most elite of the US Army’s infantry regiments – and that was something that McCleary had been trying to do for years. He heaved his kit bag onto the ground just inside the door, switched on the light and walked towards the kitchen, after 13 months in California followed by another month of debriefs, he was glad to be home.

  Opening the refrigerator, he didn’t see the figure sat in the recliner on the opposite side of the room.

  “Lieutenant Michael McCleary…” The man said, McCleary spun around “…’Mike’ to your friends – although you don’t seem to have many.”

  “who the fuck are you?” the ranger barked after his initial surprise before he strode into the room, confident of his close quarter combat abilities, “and what the fuck are you doing in my house”

  “My name is Marcus,” I answered, slowly moving forward into the room to meet McCleary “I’m sure Sergeant Benson has told you all about me.” McCleary’s stride slowed a bit, his eyes widening as memories of the two shattered bodies of his comrades and Benson’s terrified reports flashed through his mind. “And I think you know exactly why I am here.”

  The distance between us closed, McCleary reached into his waist band and pulled out his sidearm. a ranger never surrenders his weapon, a swing of my arm sent it skidding across the floor. In one swift motion, his other hand pulled out his tactical kabar knife from its scabbard on his belt and swung it upwards towards my chest. The knife made contact with my ‘skin’ and stopped dead; the force of the knife repelled by its own momentum.

  We both looked down at it as McCleary held the tip of the blade harmlessly against my body. “Well, I guess that’s something you don’t see every day.” I mocked with a shrug. I grabbed hold of the scruff of his neck with my right hand, pushing him backwards to the full distance of my arm, his left hand instinctively grabbed for the wrist that was holding him. My other hand grabbed hold of the knife, trapping his hand between my grip and the knife’s handle.

  I twisted. The popping of dislocating bones was drowned out by the scream of pain coming from the ranger’s lips and I pulled his arm up, then around, bending his arm into unnatural positions as his shoulder popped out of place and both of the major bones in his arm snapped. I kept pulling his arm around, swinging it down towards the ground before driving the blade of his own knife deep into his thigh.

  “oooh, that looks like it hurts!” I taunted as his renewed screams died
down.

  “I’m gonna rip your fucking head off!!” McCleary spat

  “With a broken arm and a knife an inch away from your femoral artery?” McCleary’s eyes widened as he glanced down at his leg and realising the danger that he was in. “Yeah, good luck with that. But between you and me, I wouldn’t move too much. One slip of the knife…” I twisted the blade slightly to emphasise my point.

  “Ok Ok!” McCleary relented. “Shit man! What do you want?”

  “We are going to talk about the Itek mission.”

  “What about it? simple recon.”

  I twisted the knife a little bit more, “Don’t fuck with me soldier!” I growled, “One more twist and not even I will be able to stop the bleeding! Now let’s try again. Itek mission, simple recon. Who gave the order to kill the CEO?”

  McCleary’s bulging eyes were a mix of pain, fear and … confusion. “What?? What order? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  It suddenly dawned on me. “…you didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?!?” his terrified voice now several octaves higher than it was when I arrived.

  I yanked the blade from his leg, being careful not to catch the artery and cause a fatal bleed – I hadn’t been bluffing about that. McCleary slumped backwards into a chair with another shriek of pain as I released my grip on his collar. Three strides across the floor and I retrieved his sidearm, sat on the chair opposite him and levelled the barrel at his head. “Ok, you are going to give me every single detail of the mission, the last night in particular. I don’t think I have to tell you what happens if you become all ‘liberal’ with the truth.” I waved the barrel of the gun from side to side to illustrate what I meant.

  “alright… Jesus” he sighed, readjusting his injured leg with a grimace. “We were deployed over a year ago. Textbook stuff, watch a building, keep an eye out for the CEO – when she arrived and what time she left, that sort of thing – and report on any unusual activities…”

  “such as…”

  “well that big ass explosion you apparently died in was a pretty fucking good example.”

  “Alright, then what.”

  “then nothing.”

  I put a bullet into the sofa between his legs

  “FuckingJesus!!!” he yelped, “What the fuck is the matter with you! I don’t know what you are asking!”

  “A man installed a virus onto the security system with an access point in the utility room! Three men broke into the office on the same night and executed Maria Gonzalez, I caught them in the ground floor hallway, killed two and let Benson live.”

  “No… no, no, you’ve got it wrong! They said she had committed suicide and they found her like that, then they were attacked in the hallway by a guy with advanced weaponry… that was…” one raised eyebrow from me told him he had the story wrong “… you?” he finished weakly.

  I looked to the tv mounted on his wall, right on cue Alice played the last few seconds of footage showing one of the three assailants shooting Maria, I still couldn’t bring myself to watch it, instead keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the wounded ranger.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered as the footage finished and the screen went blank, he turned back to me, his face completely drained of colour. “holyfuckingshit! Those fucks!... I didn’t know, man. You have to believe me; I had no fucking idea!”

  “then you’d better start telling me what you do know before you outlive your usefulness.”

  “Alright, alright… You’re pretty fucking intense, you know that?” I tapped my watch to indicate that my patience – and his time – were running out. “Ok, so, about a week before all that shit went down,” he nodded at the screen, “four new guys joined our team.”

  “Four? Not three?”

  “yeah, four. The three on the video and one who was overseeing them, kinda the link between them and the brass at Langley…”

  “Names?”

  “err… well Benson you met, the guy holding the gun was O’Connor – one mean son-of-a-bitch – the third guy was Fitzpatrick – but everyone called him Fitz.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “Yeah, him…” obviously McCleary wasn’t a fan of the fourth man. “Major Adrian Richards… guy used to be a ranger – back in the day. I’d never met him myself but he was one of the living legend types – Mogadishu, Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, he’d seen them all. But the guy was a grade A asshole, wouldn’t talk to anyone, ignored the rest of us like we were nothing.”

  “So, they were all Rangers?” I interrupted.

  “no, none of them were, at least I don’t think so. Major Richards had left the service, I thought he’d gone private, but apparently, he either works for the CIA, or the CIA are using private military contractors… I can kinda see why now” another nod at the screen.

  “Well Benson was defiantly military, dog tags said he was in 18A?”

  “18th Airborne? Well shit, yeah, that could work, those guys are pretty tough! Lots of Rangers start out in the 18th… Delta too.”

  “Right, Back to the story…”

  “Right, so, turns out they were there for some advanced recon – whereas ours was just simply watching the place, they were the guys who went in for the valuable stuff. They did a few things around the sides, jammed a few locks, one of them must’ve been the guy who planted that virus, I think they put a tracker on Gonzalez’s car too… we were kept out of the loop for most of that.”

  I nodded for him to continue.

  “That night,” another nod at the screen, “the three guys went in while Richards manned the comms, I was at my post, watching the building but I could hear the chatter from the OP, they made a few reports – that they had entered, then a few minutes later, they had killed the cameras, then they said they were going to the main office to find Gonzalez…They were quiet for a while, reported back that she was dead…”

  “I thought you said they told you it was a suicide?”

  “nah, that was later, during the debrief – that night they only said that the subject was dead and that they were going for the servers. Half hour or so later, they reported hearing noises and they were going to investigate… that was the last we heard from them. 20 minutes later, we breached the main doors and found them – or what was left of them – in the corridor, Richards put Benson in isolation and the CIA dudes took him away a few hours later, but not before he told us they were attacked by a guy in a shield – he said you ripped the other two apart. We were pulled out and then taken for debrief, that’s where they told us it was a suicide and that you were using advanced weaponry… said that’s why we were there in the first place.”

  “Where did they take you for debriefing?”

  “ah shit, I don’t know man. This is the CIA we’re talking about, they’re not exactly forthcoming when it comes to information, if you know what I mean.”

  “make an educated guess.”

  He sighed, “ok. They piled us into a chopper, about four hours, roughly north east… at a guess, I’d say somewhere around Boise in Idaho. But it was dark, no visual markers, I only know the direction from the orientation of the building when we took off, but they could’ve turned or…”

  “I get it.”

  “I can try to track the flight through Air traffic control,” Alice’s disembodied voice came from back in the cabin. “Nothing,” she continued after a short pause, “but that isn’t surprising, military flights don’t need to register with FAA and their transponders can be switched off easily. The flights are a dead end, I’m afraid.”

  “So… like… is that it?” McCleary asked, still cradling his wounded leg with his one good arm.

  “No, not even close. Who was in charge of the mission? Who did you report to?”

  “Err… there was an Agent Donaldson, he was our handler in the CIA and Captain James out of Benning was our commanding officer – I doubt he knows anything though, he only assigned the men to the mission, he didn’t deal with the details - but the other team r
eported directly to some bigwig in Fort Meade. General…” he scrunched his eyebrows trying to remember.

  “Reaves?”

  “Yes, that’s it! General Reaves, I don’t think he was the only one, but his was the only name I ever heard.”

  “What about General Blake?”

  “I, Err… I don’t… I don’t know who that is… if he was involved in the mission then I never heard about it.”

  “So, as far as you know, General Morgan Blake had nothing to do with this mission at all?”

  “Look, I can’t tell you anything about the CIA side, but as far as the Rangers go? There is no General Blake anywhere in the chain of command, we have to memorise it, all the way up to the President and I’ve never heard of him.” There was a pause as I processed this information. Alice was silent on her end too. “is that it... can I go now?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Ah c’mon man. I don’t know anything else!” McCleary dropped his head into the back of the sofa in frustration.

  “well then, it’s a good thing I believe you. So instead of asking you questions, I am going to give you a set of instructions which you will follow as soon as you get back on duty.” I pointed the gun at his leg so he knew what I meant. “First, stop doing work for the CIA, I know its voluntary and it’s fair to say that is hazardous to your health…”

  “no shit.”

  “Second, you are going to find a way to contact General Reaves, email, phone, carrier pigeon, I don’t care. You are going to say that Marcus – that’s me – isn’t finished with him yet.”

  “That’s the message?”

  “That’s the message.”

  “Ok… can do, sir” we both frowned for a second at his use of the title, “consider it done.”

  “Oh, and Michael?” he looked up at me as I stood and put his weapon on the sofa next to where I had been sitting, “if you don’t follow my instructions… well… I suppose it’s a bit redundant to say I know where you live.” With that, my hologram burst into a cloud of Nanites and disappeared.