He loaded the briefcase and empty sports bag in the trunk of the rental car when he left the hotel, and drove, following the directions on the print-out, to the specified location. It was a red brick house in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Atlanta. The houses were surrounded by woods of pine trees, magnolias, live oaks, and sweet gums. White and pink flowering dogwoods lined the street on both sides. It was a well-to-do neighborhood of two-car families, each house with a Sport Utility Vehicle and either a BMW, Lexus, Mercedes Benz, Cadillac, or Audi in the driveway. He pulled up in the driveway behind a red Jeep Cherokee and a dark blue Lexus. There was a pink bicycle in the yard with pink and blue streamers coming out of the handlebars. It was a two-story house with a well-manicured lawn bordered by white dogwoods.
The neighborhood was quiet; it was early Sunday morning. Henry got out of his car, gently shut the door, and walked towards the front of the house. The mailbox had the name on it, Rohde. Odd spelling, Henry thought for a moment. Then he forgot about it. He was focused on his work now, on the job at hand.
He knocked on the door.
A minute later the door opened and Mrs. Rohde stood in the doorway looking at Henry.
"Can I help you?"
"Who is it?" came a man’s voice from further inside the house.
"I’m looking for Sam Rohde," Henry said.
"Sam?"
Henry nodded. Mrs. Rohde frowned, then turned her head to the side.
"It’s a man who says he’s looking for Sam Rohde!" she shouted.
A moment later Mr. Rohde walked up to the door. His hair was different, shorter than in the family portrait, but it was definitely him.
"Can I help you?" the man asked in a somewhat confrontational tone.
Henry just looked at him for a moment, then smoothly pulled his silenced 9mm and aimed it point blank and dead center at Mr. Rohde’s chest. Squeezed the trigger. The gun popped. Mr. Rohde’s eyes were wide with disbelief as he lurched back. Henry, stepping inside, adjusted his aim up from the man’s chest and squeezed the trigger again. The gun popped again, and Mr. Rohde’s head jerked back. He fell backwards, his arms flaying. His left hand brushed a framed photograph, knocking it to the floor. Glass shattered.
"David!" Mrs. Rohde screamed.
Henry was already turning to go when he realized that the name she had screamed was not Sam. Quickly he went back inside. Mrs. Rohde backed away in horror as Henry knelt by the body of her husband. He reached around and felt the man’s pockets, then pulled out a wallet. He opened the wallet and looked at the driver’s license. The name was David Arthur Rohde. Not Sam.
While Henry puzzled over this, Mrs. Rohde ran to the den. She pulled what appeared to be a massive volume of the collected works of William Shakespeare off the top shelf of the bookcase, which was near the end-table upon which a phone sat. She opened the volume, which revealed a hidden pocket. From within she pulled a small, .25 caliber revolver, loaded. She flicked the safety off and held the gun ready with one hand, while with her other hand she picked up the phone receiver and dialed 9-1-1.
"Please," Mrs. Rohde half sobbed into the phone as she waited for the emergency operator to pick up.
Henry went into the room after her.
"Where’s Sam?" he asked.
She pointed the revolver at him, and reflexively he raised his gun and fired as she fired. His gun popped for the third time that day, and hers emitted a loud crack! The bullet from his 9mm went through Mrs. Rohde’s chest, right through her heart. The bullet from her .25 grazed Henry’s right arm. Her legs crumpled beneath her and she fell lifeless to the floor. Henry didn’t fall. His arm burned where the bullet had ripped a groove through his flesh, punching a neat hole through his jacket and shirt sleeve underneath. He stopped for a second, squeezed his eyes closed and clenched his teeth as the first sharp wave of pain hit, but that was it. He’d been shot before and knew this time it wasn’t that bad. It felt as if someone had pulled a saw blade across his arm. But Mrs. Rohde was dead.
Henry picked up the phone, held it to his ear. Still ringing, and there was a click after each ring as if the connection couldn’t quite be made. So much for 9-1-1. He placed the receiver back in its cradle. He picked up the revolver, still in Mrs. Rohde’s hand, and placed it on the table by the phone.
Who the hell was Sam Rohde?
Then he heard music. He stopped and listened. It was faint, coming from upstairs, the kind of music he remembered hearing at carnivals and the circus when he went to things like that all those years ago.
Henry went back through the hallway, then slowly went up the stairs, the wood creaking beneath his weight. The music got slightly louder. It reminded him of a Merry-go-round. At the top of the stairs was another hallway, framed photographs along both walls. He didn’t look at them. All the doors on both sides of the hall were closed, except one that was slightly open. Cautiously, his weapon ready, Henry approached the open door.
When he got to the open door, Henry saw there was a sign on the door, which read SamaNtHa jEaNNEtte’S rOOm. Samantha Jeannette… Sam?
He pushed the door open. In front of a child’s brightly colored computer sat a little brown-haired girl wearing earphones. The music came from speakers on each side of the overlarge screen, and on the screen danced a frog. The girl was singing the words to a song that Henry could just hear coming from the headphones, in time with the music coming from the speakers. He couldn’t make out the words because the girl was barely even whispering them. She wore a little sky-blue dress, no shoes, and her hair was pinned back by a large, plastic, blue butterfly clip.
Her name was Sam. That was all Henry’s mind could grasp at the moment. She was the girl in the photograph. This was the right address. Her name was Sam.
The girl saw Henry’s shadow on her monitor and turned to look at him.
He’d been sent there to kill her.
Henry looked down the barrel of his silenced 9mm at the big, brown eyes of a little girl. She had her father’s eyes. They flickered to look at the silencer on the end of the gun, and then back at Henry’s face. She looked at him without fear, as if she could see his soul.
Chapter 5
Early Sunday morning, Peter Cornwall received a phone call from London. It was Winston. Winston spoke in halting, seemingly hesitant speech and told Mr. Cornwall what he was to do. Cornwall listened attentively even if he did get somewhat impatient with Winston’s slow, measured manner of speaking. It was necessary for Winston to speak in this way, though. Several months before, whilst Peter was back in England, a code was worked out based in on the specific words that Winston used and their very intentional pronunciation. Winston could speak in several different variations on the English accent, from Cockney to the crisp London accent of the upper crust. It sounded almost natural, as if someone were speaking with extreme patience and precision.
E-mail was entirely out of the question given the nature of their subject…they’d intercepted enough suspect e-mails themselves, using Winston. The game was afoot with the United Nations’ A.I., but it begged the question: What exactly was the game? Winston had a theory, and they were acting on it as though it were more than a theory, until something better came along.
Across the street, in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Vincent Waldrup sat at a desk that wasn’t his own in an office that was actually a storeroom, and looked at the face of a twentynothing hacker he knew only as Dex. The face was not real, but a three-dimensional animation, warped and grotesque, on the laptop’s monitor. Waldrup wondered if it was a representation of Dex’s real face. If so, then Waldrup at least knew that Dex was white, or Hispanic, or possibly Asian, with dark hair and a goatee.
"It’s goin’ down," Dex said, his voice digitally distorted, almost bubbling from the small speakers on the edges of the keyboard.
"You’re sure?" Waldrup asked.
"You know it."
"How are you sure?" Waldrup asked. He was always trying to pry into
Dex’s head to get an idea of how the outlaw hacker mind worked.
"I feel a tremor in the Force, dude," Dex said, laughing.
"Seriously," Waldrup said.
"Seriously, dude," Dex said. "Somethin’ is going down in Atlanta, Georgia." He pronounced it ‘Jaw-ja.’
"There’s a node in Atlanta."
"I know."
"Any other activity, from anyone else?"
Dex nodded.
"The Vatican," he said. "The Brits. That’s all, so far."
"So far?" Waldrup asked. "Who else is there?"
"Well, the Chinese, the Russians, the Germans, the Brazilians, the Indians, the Indonesians, the Israelies," Dex rattled them off quickly. "They all have A.I. technology, just not as up to speed as the Big Three."
The Big Three, Waldrup knew, were the Brits, the Vatican, and the United Nations. It slightly bugged him that the United States was not one of the Big Three, but the U.S. had gone into the U.N’s Oracle Project assuming that the five permanent members of the Security Council would basically control it, and the U.S. was by far and away the most influential member of that potent little club, although sometimes China liked to feel her oats.
Only rarely had Oracle made a suggestion that differed greatly with U.S. policy. Generally, the U.S. wanted what Oracle was programmed to do because world peace and global economic stability could only help the U.S. Waldrup felt secure in the knowledge that there was no dark agenda driving U.S. policy with regards to Oracle that was somehow detrimental to the rest of the world. Oracle was programmed to help as many human beings as mathematically possible determine the path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How could the U.S. want anything less?
Henry’s employer had never made a mistake. From the moment his employer had made first contact with Henry, there were no mistakes. Everything had always come off as expected. There was always an element of uncertainty, of course, but it was accounted for and figured into the equation. Henry undertook every job with the full realization that there were risks to himself and to "innocent" people. Innocent in this case meant bodyguards, soldiers, and close acquaintances of the intended target. On rare occasions it had meant innocent civilians whose lives, when weighed against the death of the target, were acceptable collateral damages. But it had never meant a little girl before.
And no one under the age of sixteen had ever been the main target. Henry doubted that Sam had been sitting there in her room contemplating the next Holocaust. What could an eight-year-old child be capable of that would warrant killing her for the good of humanity?
So it had to be mistake. He’d been sent to kill someone who did not need to die for the good of humanity. If it was not a mistake, if Henry’s employer had indeed sent him to kill an eight-year-old girl named Samantha Jeannette Rohde…then the world Henry had known for the last five years was a lie.
"Who are you?" the girl asked.
"My name is Henry."
"Where’s Mommy and Daddy?" she asked.
"Downstairs," Henry answered without pausing.
"Are you a stranger?" she asked.
Henry wasn’t sure how to answer that one. "I’m a friend," he said after a moment. The pause did not escape her notice.
"You’re not my friend," Samantha Rohde told Henry.
"I want to be your friend," he said, then realized his mistake.
The girl shook her head. She had him. Henry remembered his daughter used to do that…if she knew you wanted her to want something, then she was determined not to want it. It was so long ago, but he remembered.
He didn’t know what to do. Should he call the police, call 9-1-1 and then get the hell out of there? If it turned out to be a mistake then that seemed like the best thing to do. But what if, incredibly, it was not a mistake? He remembered a job he’d been sent on, and he learned later, after that job, that he’d been sent because another man who’d been sent didn’t get the job done. The plane he’d been sent on had crashed during a landing attempt, due to wind shear. A freak accident, completely out of his employer’s control. But Henry was sent to finish what had been started. The same thing would happen here, if it was not a mistake that Henry had been sent to kill the girl. If he didn’t do the job, someone else would be sent who would do the job.
The police would not be able to protect her. No one would. Could he protect her? He wondered about that.
Maybe he could, long enough to find out what was going on. Maybe he could contact his employer and explain the situation and it would be all right. His stomach did flip-flops. A little voice in his head told him it would not be all right.
The girl still sat there, watching him. The frog on her computer monitor was twiddling its thumbs, waiting. Henry realized he was still pointing the gun right at the little girl’s head. He lowered the gun to his side.
"I’m only going to say this once," Henry said. "Something bad happened downstairs. Your Mom and Dad…" He didn’t know how to explain it. "Your Mom and Dad were hurt by a bad man."
She lowered her chin, but her eyes were still locked on his.
"What happened?" she asked.
Good question, he thought. His first instinct was to just tell her that her parents had left and then try to keep her from seeing their bodies. But that wouldn’t work. She’d know he was lying. He’d never been able to lie to kids, they could always tell. Her parents were dead and it would be better for her to know this. He realized she was going to have to see them for herself. It would be better for her to just get it over with.
"I’ll show you," he said, his voice almost getting caught in his throat. Was it cruel to show her? Would he have done this to his own daughter?
He motioned for her to go before him into the hall.
The house was eerily silent. The silence betrayed nothing of the murder and mayhem that had just occurred in the Rohde household. Putting that spin on it, Henry couldn’t believe that he’d been the instrument of the mayhem.
Downstairs. Sam stared at the body of her father in the hall by the front door. Blood had soaked the carpet around the man’s head, which was turned to the side, the eyes closed. Sam didn’t move. Henry felt he should say something, but he couldn’t think of anything.
Sam looked at Henry.
"Is my Daddy sleeping?" she asked.
"No."
Now she looked at Henry.
"Is my Daddy in Heaven?" she asked.
Henry nodded. She looked back at her father’s body. Henry wondered what was happening behind those brown eyes. How was she processing this? Did she think he’d done it?
The phone rang.
It startled Henry. It rang again. The girl walked towards the phone there in the living room.
"Don’t," Henry said rather forcefully. He thought it might be the 9-1-1 service calling back even though Mrs. Rohde’s call never went through.
From where she stood the girl could see the body of her mother in the dining room.
The phone rang a third time.
The phone rang a fourth time. On this one, though, the girl picked up. Henry had been focused only on the phone, and didn’t even see her reach for it.
"Don’t!" he yelled, but it was too late. She had the phone to her ear.
"Hello," she answered. Henry froze.
She turned to look at Henry as she listened to whoever it was on the other end. After a few seconds, she held the phone out to Henry.
"Okay," she said to whoever was on the line. She held the phone out to Henry, then. "It’s for you." He felt a chill in his blood.
Whoever was calling couldn’t know anything. Not one thing. Maybe it was a telemarketer who needed to speak to an adult or something.
He took the phone from her.
"Yes," he said.
"Whoever you are, this is a friend." The voice was a man’s, accented, but clear and deep. "I know what you were sent to do…I also know you were not able to do it. However, there are others who are able to do it. They will find her, and they will do the job
you could not. I want to help you. Go to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Atlanta and wait. They’re expecting you. I will get there as soon as I can. Whatever you do, do not take the girl to the police. The authorities cannot help us, but they can make it more difficult to do what must be done. May God be with you."
"Who are you?" Henry asked.
"I told you… I’m a friend." The caller hung up.
Henry was stunned. There were forces at work that rivaled the abilities of his employer. This much was obvious.
His mind swirled with the implications of this even as he realized that the girl was no longer standing in the room. She was gone. The call had distracted him enough to let her slip out of the room unnoticed. He went to the back of the house, where the back door was closed. Through the glass window that made up the upper half of the door he saw the screen door slowly closing as well.
He opened the back door and stepped out onto a small brick patio. Sam Rohde was nowhere in sight. But then Henry saw movement in the woods beyond the recently mowed grass of the back yard. His gut told him it was the girl. He went after her.
Cardinal Roscoe stood on the sidewalk in front of Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The wind was funneled down the street by the skyscrapers causing his hair to whip around. He still held the cell phone in his hand after making the call to the Rohde residence. He wandered down the street, looking for a suitable place to discard the cell phone. He’d followed instructions, not placing the call with a phone in St. Patrick’s. If the authorities did get involved the Church wanted there to be no hard evidence of its involvement. The cell phone account had been set up under a false identity for him.
Roscoe wondered if Augustine was right about the man who had been sent to the Rohde residence. A man who could murder innocent adults, but who could not kill a young girl? It seemed to Roscoe that someone capable of the first could make the leap to the second rather easily. But perhaps there were special circumstances that made this particular assassin different. Either way, Roscoe wondered if his message would even be heard by the man. And, if so, he wondered what would happen now.
The Oracle Paradox Page 3