Sam’s head moved so she could see the screen.
"Ribbet," she said in a quiet voice.
"Is Ribbet your friend?" Tina felt Sam’s head nod on her shoulder. The words on the screen faded and were replaced by a question: How are you? "Can I put you down, Sam?" Tina asked.
"Yes," Sam replied. Tina let the girl down, and Sam went right to her computer and unplugged the headphones.
"I’m fine," she said to Ribbett. "How are you?"
I’m great! The words appeared silently on the screen as the animated frog jumped up and spun around, then landed on his haunches.
Sam just sat there and stared at the screen.
What’s wrong? Ribbett asked. You look sad.
"Mommy and Daddy," Sam said, sniffing back tears.
"We need clothes for her," Henry said. Tina looked at him. He seemed completely unaffected by the fact that the little girl’s father was lying dead, in a pool of blood, right downstairs. And her mother was down there, somewhere, also dead. Tina hadn’t seen the body, but she knew. "She needs shoes, and whatever else we can carry…" He looked around, grabbed a pillow from Sam’s bed. "Use the pillow case." He held it out to Tina.
She ignored it. "Why did this happen?" she asked. None of it made sense to her.
"I told you, it was a mistake," Henry said.
"A mistake," she repeated flatly.
"Look," he went on. "We may not have time to hang around here and discuss it. What happened was a tragic mistake, and I want to make sure it doesn’t get worse." He glanced at Sam, who sat at her computer. She tapped the ENTER key on her keyboard. Ribbet the frog was now an angel with wings, floating among the clouds. This is Heaven, Ribbett said in that cartoonishly illuminated script.
"Oh my God," Tina whispered. "That poor kid."
"At least she’s alive," Henry said. "I’d like her to stay that way, and I’m sure you would, too."
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
"It means that we need to be gone, and soon. We can’t stay here because they’ll send someone else."
"Who?"
"I don’t know."
"Maybe they won’t send anyone. Maybe they’ll realize it was all a big mistake. I mean, she’s a little girl! They’ll have to think something isn’t right, won’t they?"
Henry just shook his head.
"All I know is…someone will show up here sooner or later, and that someone will have the singular purpose of…eliminating her. I might be able to stop that from happening if we leave here."
Tina looked at Henry’s face, into his eyes. He didn’t blink, didn’t avert his eyes. As far as she could tell, he was telling the truth. And she could sense the urgency in his voice. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense. He really believed someone would come…and had she not seen the silencer on his gun, and the body of Sam’s father, and the wound in Henry’s arm… Tina wouldn’t have believed any of it for even a moment. But it was all real, it was happening, and now she was part of it.
Yatin Kumar entered his office and turned on the light. His motion in front of the monitor brought it to life. There was an optical sensor in the center top of the monitor, a digital camera which he used in teleconferences with members of his staff around the globe. It was also how Oracle could "see" him. Within moments, his computer beeped. Someone was contacting him over the Internet, as if magically aware of his arrival in his office. He knew who it was, of course. Who? What was more like it. Not someone, but something. Oracle was not a person, but a thing, no matter how many human-like qualities it might possess. All of those human-like qualities were the result of programming, lines of code written by Yatin or one of the two dozen programmers under him who’d contributed to Oracle’s being. It was Kumar, though, who’d given Oracle what might constitute its soul, if an Artificial Intelligence could ever be said to have the artificial equivalent. The core of Oracle’s being had sprung from Yatin Kumar’s head, like Athena had sprung from the head of Zeus. Actually, the very center of the core of Oracle’s being was the Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Those two documents, translated into the machine language of artificial intelligence, were the very essence of Oracle’s soul. As a shell around that core, Yatin had written code based on the principles of nyaya, or the philosophy of logic and reasoning. The ultimate goal of nyaya was the absolute cessation of pain and suffering in all of the human race. Of course, the true interpretation of nyaya implied that in order to achieve this freedom from pain and misery one’s soul must become totally disconnected from the body and senses. Yatin had decided not to try to make Oracle into the world’s first artificial Buddhist instructor, so instead he had written code directing Oracle to seek out ways to bring humanity as a whole closer to that divine state of liberation without forcing everyone on the planet to engage in the practices of sravana, manana, and nididhyasana.
Hello, Yatin, Oracle greeted him silently. The words appeared in a box much like a typical chat room on the World Wide Web.
"Hello, Oracle," Yatin said. Oracle could "hear" him via the thin, plastic microphone on his desk that enabled him to have those teleconferences. Anything he could do to have a teleconference, he could do to communicate directly with Oracle. Yatin’s own words appeared in the box below Oracle’s.
How are you today? Oracle asked.
"I’m doing very well, thank you," Kumar replied. He couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear. Speaking to Oracle was like speaking to the future. It was as if he were having a conversation with a child who represented the next step in humanity’s evolution; in some ways the child was naive and needed guidance, and in other ways the child possessed a wisdom beyond what Yatin, or any other human being, could ever hope to achieve in a thousand lifetimes.
The summary of my activities for the week is ready, if you would like to read it, Oracle said.
"Yes, I would," Yatin said. "Send it to the printer, please."
No sooner had he finished the sentence than the printer hummed to life. The summary report only came to five pages, quite unlike the monthly diagnostics report Yatin, as Director of Oracle Oversight Committee, was expected to file to the Security Council. Each entry of the weekly report summarized a project Oracle had successfully finalized during the previous week. One example was titled Affordable housing for migrant workers in the northern Mexico export-processing factories (maquiladoras). Successful negotiations with the following corporations to provide subsidized housing and regular wage increases for factory workers near the Mexican/U.S. border. There followed a list of companies that manufactured everything from Japanese economy cars to basketball shoes to snack cakes to cell phones.
One entry was titled Negotiation of whaling agreement between Greenpeace, the United Nations, Japan, Norway, and Russia finalized.
Another was called Successful Debate with Governments of China, Pakistan, Jordan, and Indonesia to Sign the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action for Human Rights.
Some of these were issues that had plagued the U.N. for years. Some Oracle had been working on for months. In the tangled web of politics, even Oracle could find itself mired down by intractable opposition. But, over time, it could tirelessly negotiate an agreement between any two parties. It did not lose patience like humans. It did not make illogical choices based on the purely emotional concepts of honor and pride.
It amazed Yatin what Oracle accomplished in a typical week. Most of the world’s great leaders had spent lifetimes working on a singular goal. Of course, Oracle was as familiar as any scholar with the lives of Ghandi, King, Churchill, Carter, Mother Theresa, Mandela, and all the other great saints of world peace and human rights. Their lives and deeds had formed the outer shell of Oracle’s being, as it were. In a way, Oracle was their legacy. Yatin Kumar was sure that they’d each be as pleased with Oracle as was he.
Chapter 9
Traffic jam. On a Sunday, no less. Late morning. Henry was acutely aware of every second that ticked by as they sat there on the road in
his rental car, not moving. Sam was in the back seat with some stuffed animals, dolls, and her bright purple kid’s laptop. The back doors had child-proof safety locks, which meant that Henry had control of the locks via buttons on his door. Sam couldn’t open the door from the inside. There was always the chance that Tina could unlock the back doors via the button on her door, but there wasn’t anything Henry could do about that, except gamble that she wouldn’t try it.
There were clothes for Sam in the trunk. Henry maintained a dim hope that perhaps he’d be able to foist her off to whomever had called him at the Rohde house. Was it a Catholic Church official? It could be anybody, really. So why was he going there? His experience told him he shouldn’t go, but his instincts told him the caller had been sincere. He did not believe it was a trap. Believe. He was going on faith. The irony of it did not escape him.
Tina sat in the passenger seat and stared out her window. She didn’t speak at all. Henry left the radio off in order to think, so there was an uncomfortable silence in the car. He didn’t care. He needed the silence in order to think clearly.
He tried to imagine what his employer might be thinking at that moment. Did he, or she, or they know what had happened? Would a replacement assassin be sent, or had one already been sent? If so, then going by past experience as the hunter and not the prey, Henry had very little faith in his ability to keep Sam alive for very long.
As the hunter Henry had managed to track down and kill every one of his intended targets. Every one except Sam, of course. He’d been able to infiltrate armed camps and secret government facilities in Europe, North and South America, Russia, the Middle East, and India. Although a few had managed to prolong their lives for a few extra days, weeks, or even months…ultimately, Henry found them. And he killed them in cold blood, mercilessly, almost mechanically.
It had always given him a sense of justice, though, to send them to their graves. Only one, a young woman in France, had given him pause. She was a beautiful, nineteen-year-old nationalist who claimed to have heard the voice of Jean d’Arc telling her that France was destined to become the greatest power in Europe again…unless the country remained a member of the European Union. The French nationalist parties were beginning to rally around her when Henry put a stop to it all with one bullet. Delphine Armat was her name. She’d come from a small village near Toulouse. She’d been a student in theater before hearing the voice of Jean d’Arc and embarking on the path that would intersect with Henry’s.
What separated Delphine Armat from Sam Rohde? A dozen years or so? What was that? It was nothing. It was a lifetime. Henry could see the top of Sam’s head in the rearview mirror. She glanced up and her gaze met his. Why could Henry kill Delphine, but not Sam? Had he been sent when Sam was eighteen, he would have done it. Maybe even sixteen.
The reflection of Sam’s eyes watched him from the rearview mirror. It was almost unnerving the way she looked directly at him. So much like his daughter’s eyes… Conflicting emotions were bubbling beneath the surface of his calm exterior. It was as if she could see the turmoil, as if she knew he was not in control of the situation.
Traffic inched forward until they reached an intersection where a fender-bender had occurred. The wound in his arm pulsed as if to remind him that even something as innocuous as a fender-bender could be a set-up. He tensed. As if sensing this, Tina looked at him. He held his gun in his lap with his left hand, steering with his right. His wounded arm pulsed with pain. Luckily, he was left-handed.
They passed by the accident slowly. There was one police cruiser on the scene, lights flashing, the officer standing off to the side interviewing the drivers. One of the drivers, a middle-aged black man, glanced at Henry, made eye-contact with him, but nothing happened.
Tina looked past Henry at the officer.
"Don’t try anything stupid," Henry said. It came out harshly, more so than intended.
Once past the accident traffic thinned considerably and Henry was able to drive at normal speed. At the moment he was just heading in the general direction of downtown. He’d looked up the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the Yellow Pages at Tina’s. It was on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and Central Avenue in downtown Atlanta. He could scarcely believe what he was doing. Taking the girl to a church? In his experience, that would not help her. It hadn’t helped Henry’s mark in Northern Ireland. Even as the man had knelt before a statue of the Virgin, Henry put a bullet through his head.
But somehow, someone had known he’d be at the Rohde house. Perhaps it was someone else who worked for his employer. That was a distinct possibility. He could be heading right into a trap. His instincts told that it wasn’t a trap, though. They also told him something wasn’t quite right about it.
What else could he do?
Nothing.
The man sitting next to Cardinal Roscoe on Delta Flight 1140 from New York to Atlanta was reading a worn, Stephen King paperback. It was The Dead Zone, about a man who could see the future, if Roscoe remembered correctly. He hadn’t read a Stephen King book in years, indeed had read very little fiction in recent memory. As he grew older he found he had less patience with fiction. He preferred history and biographies of historical figures.
No one on the plane knew who he was. He wore no outward sign of his position with the Church. He liked it that way, generally. He traveled in coach, anonymously, and could believe that he was just one of the flock. Of course, there was no telling who on the plane was Catholic and who wasn’t. Occasionally, during takeoff or as the plane descended for a landing, a person would hold a rosary in their hand…usually it was an older person. This was one of the great worries of the Church, the overall aging of the congregation. Younger people were turning away from religion; or if not that, they certainly weren’t turning towards it.
Up until Augustine’s discovery concerning the U.N.’s A.I., Oracle, the aging issue had been Roscoe’s major area of concern. He’d spent most of his time trying to figure out how to get the message of the Church to young people all over the world. In certain countries, like Mexico and Poland, this wasn’t so much of a problem. But even in countries like Spain and Ireland, the young people seemed to be less interested in questions of the soul and God, and more interested in worldly issues. Indeed, this problem was one of the principle issues that Augustine had been created to help the Church solve. And now, here was Cardinal Roscoe deeply immersed in a most worldly realm…a world of artificial intelligence and assassins.
Augustine had determined that Oracle posed a real threat to the continued existence of the Church. How? This was uncertain. It all had to do with a matrix of events that Oracle had initiated.
The future of the Church hung in the balance. Indeed, the future of civilization might hang in the balance, according to some interpretations of Augustine’s conclusions. At the very least the fate of a child would be decided. That decision had not yet been made, surprisingly enough. It was one of the things about his current undertaking that troubled Roscoe.
She was somehow crucial to the outcome of the events that were about to unfold. That was all Roscoe knew, so far. Augustine was analyzing the situation even as Roscoe soared down the east coast.
Around him the people sat, unaware of the turmoil in his mind. Forward he went, despite his misgivings…a good Catholic following the Pope’s decree.
A Nippon Air L-1011 landed at Tokyo’s Narita airport, and fifteen minutes later a petite woman walked up the ramp to the gate. Her long, brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her blue eyes coolly regarded the men around her, who gawked at her crystalline features with obvious lust. Such men were nothing to her. Less than nothing. The only man who could melt her icy exterior and find his way inside was a man with the eyes of a predator and the bloodlust to make those eyes burn. Her Antony had died in the early stages of the last Chechen War…sold to the Chechens by the men of his own command, then executed. It was the state of things in Russia. Milla was glad to be away. She’d never been to Japan, didn’
t speak Japanese at all save for a few words she was able to learn in a phrase book she’d studied on the long flight from Moscow. Her plan was to stay as long as her money held out, and then do whatever she needed to do in order to make more money to either stay longer or go somewhere else. She had no intentions of going back to Russia.
As was her habit, she turned her cell phone back on to check for messages, although there never were any since Antony’s death. He used to leave her love messages all the time, his deep, rich voice describing in detail all the things he’d do to her when his next leave from the army came up… However, much to her surprise, there was a message. She called her voice mailbox and listened. The voice leaving the message was familiar to her, although she had not heard it in years. Its Russian had been smoothed by the years its owner had spent living in America.
It was Andrei Udin, who’d gone on to greater things since the days of the Chechen War when he’d commanded a cell of Russian assassins for the KGB’s successor organization; Milla Kulinich, all of eighteen then, had been one of the assassins, along with Antony. She listened to the message with amazement and also some annoyance.
There was a ticket waiting for her at the Nippon Air counter. One-way, Tokyo to Atlanta. In Atlanta there would be further instructions. That was all. It was very presumptuous of Udin for him to think that Milla would pick up where they’d left off and follow orders just like that. Very presumptuous indeed. Her first instinct was to ignore the message, to erase it from her voice mail and take a taxi to her hotel. She’d left Udin and that life in the past. It had all died with Antony.
Or had it?
There was a three hour wait before the flight to Atlanta. She had time to think about it over a glass of sake.
Waldrup listened attentively while his fourteen-year-old daughter, Mandy, explained to him over the phone that because tomorrow was a teacher’s work day she was spending the night at her friend Tiffany’s.
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