Influx

by Daniel Suarez

  “Grady didn’t do this alone, Mr. Director. He was helped.” The head of Jon Grady’s security detail, a Morrison named Beta-Upsilon, stood nervously before Hedrick’s desk. The elder Morrison stood nearby looking even angrier than Hedrick felt.

  “We had no reason to expect he’d have a personal utility fog.”

  Morrison barked, “Did you scan him before transport?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be advised: I will check the surveillance log.”

  “We scanned him, sir.”

  “Then I’m not understanding. Do you mean someone on your team helped Mr. Grady?”

  “No, sir. Someone at Hibernity must have helped him. That van was clean. The hypersonic transport was clean.”

  Morrison got in his face. “You’re suggesting the guards at Hibernity had access to unregistered foglets?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “The garrison there doesn’t even have access to tech level eight.”

  Hedrick rotated his chair to face the young BTC officer.

  Morrison placed a glittering diamond on Hedrick’s desk. “The response team found Grady’s q-link in a ventilation shaft.”

  Hedrick picked up the diamond, studying it—then looked up at the young Morrison clone. “Am I to believe Jon Grady dug this out of the base of his spine on the spot?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “And how did he even know about his q-link?”

  Varuna’s voice chimed in from above. “Beta-Upsilon is speaking the truth to the best of his knowledge, Mr. Director.”

  Morrison glowered. “An honest idiot is still an idiot.”

  “Dad, we had no way of anticipating—”

  “I sprayed surveillance dust onto the headliner. I know you were all watching the Tigers game instead of the prisoner. I have the whole god-awful mess on video. Grady had unregistered utility foglets collapsed on his person, and you didn’t spot them.”

  “The scanner said he was clean.”

  “Some clever son of a bitch manufactured unregistered nanotech. That’s why you have to do this thing we call ‘searching’ prisoners. With your eyes and hands.”

  “We patted him down.”

  “And how much cash did he take from your wallet?”

  The guard looked suddenly sheepish. “Uh, I don’t . . .”

  “Yes, I saw that, too. How much?”

  “Probably four or five hundred in dollars, sir.”

  “All of it.”

  “Maybe half that in other currencies.”

  “You really make me ashamed of my genomic sequence.”

  “Dad—”

  “Don’t try that ‘Dad’ crap on me.” Morrison looked to Hedrick. “And someone tipped off Grady not to take the guards’ equipment. We have no direct method to track him.”

  “Enough. Get him out of my sight.” Hedrick dismissed the guard with a wave of his hand.

  The young man nodded grimly and left; the doors opened and then immediately closed behind him.

  Hedrick sighed. “Varuna, reassign Beta-Upsilon and his team to the Hibernity garrison for a year.”

  “Yes, Mr. Director.”

  Morrison came up alongside Hedrick’s chair to gaze out the window at the faux Hong Kong below.

  “Who is the warden at Hibernity, Mr. Morrison?”

  “Theta-Theta.”

  “We need new leadership there, apparently. And a top-to-bottom review of their operation.”

  “How could they get their hands on a utility fog? That’s advanced weaponry.”

  “I don’t think they did.”

  Morrison cast a confused look at Hedrick.

  “Min Zhao is in Hibernity.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “He perfected foglets less than a decade ago.”

  “You really think prisoners are creating their own technology? Prisoners?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But . . .” Morrison pondered this gravely. “I don’t see how it’s possible.”

  Hedrick felt a fear he could hardly contemplate. “Your number-one priority at the moment, Mr. Morrison, is to find Jon Grady. Escaped, Mr. Grady is an existential threat to this organization. I don’t think either of us relishes the idea of a gravity weapon like Kratos in the hands of our enemies.”

  “When we locate him, I suggest we fry him from orbit.”

  “No. I still need him alive. If he won’t work for us voluntarily, we have no choice but to use force. But it appears his consciousness is truly unique. So I want him captured. Is that clear?”

  Morrison nodded. “I’ll need a higher tech level approved for the forward team.”

  “I don’t want you annihilating city blocks to get at him. Nonlethal weapons only. And no publicity. I’ll allow tech level four.”

  “Four? They’ll barely be able to overpower the authorities.”

  “Then they’ll need to be smarter this time. I can’t have any more advanced technology going missing. Tech level four will be sufficient. Is that clear?”

  Morrison sighed in irritation but nodded. He turned to leave.

  “One more thing . . .”

  Morrison halted.

  “Once you’ve got Grady, I want you to pay a surprise visit to Hibernity—in force.”

  “Do we clean house?”

  Hedrick picked up a small model that he kept on his desk. It was supposedly of his first fusion reactor design. “Yes. And I want a manual prisoner count.”

  “That’s a big job. Opening up every cell will take—”

  “I want you to lay eyes on him—personally.”

  Morrison studied Hedrick. “Archibald Chattopadhyay is dead. His cell has been dormant for a decade. No food. No water. He’s entombed in nine hundred feet of solid rock.”

  “I want you to lay eyes on him.”

  “There’s no way he could have—”

  “Just do it.”

  Morrison stared for a moment, then nodded.

  At that moment the office doors opened to admit Alexa. Both men looked up; Hedrick brightened at the sight of her.

  “What is it, my dear?”

  “The deep packet AIs have a lead on our Mr. Grady.”

  Hedrick felt the relief wash over him. “Well done. Where?”

  “Last night an FBI agent in Chicago ran fingerprints on a suspect and got a match for Jon Grady.”

  Hedrick slammed his hand on his desk. “Then they have him.”

  “No. And an FBI agent started doing Internet searches for the ‘Federal Bureau of Technology Control.’”

  Hedrick scowled.

  “It was the arresting agent in the Richard Louis Cotton case: one Denise Davis.”

  Hedrick looked shocked. “You don’t think Cotton has—?”

  “No. Cotton’s a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot. His sense of self-preservation is legendary.”

  Morrison nodded to himself. “Chicago’s just a few hours by car from here.”

  She turned toward Hedrick. “This Davis woman has been all over the media lately for the Cotton trial. Perhaps Grady saw her and thought he could trust her.”

  Hedrick motioned impatiently. “Do we know where Grady is?”

  “We know where he was.” Alexa brought up a holographic video window that showed thousands of video thumbnails all running simultaneously. “I had the AIs go back through the last twenty-four hours of street-level surveillance on all systems they could access within five miles of Agent Davis’s location in downtown Chicago, looking for Jon Grady’s likeness in the streets. A lot of federal and city cameras in the area, so we had good coverage.”

  “And?”

  “No hits on Jon Grady.”

  Hedrick threw up his hands.

  “I decided to do
a search for Agent Davis’s movements, figuring he must have followed her for a while, waiting for the right moment to make contact. And that’s when I found this . . .” She selected and then expanded a single video image and froze it.

  The surveillance camera image wasn’t anywhere near as detailed as what the BTC’s cameras could produce, but it was clear enough. It showed a woman with short hair walking with several men in suits on a crowded Chicago sidewalk. The woman was highlighted by the system in a red rectangular box.

  But Alexa pointed to a man walking several yards behind her, wearing jeans and a hoodie. The man’s face was notable in the crowd because it was obscured by pinpoints of blinding light.

  Hedrick frowned in confusion. “What am I looking at? And how could a person be walking in a crowd with such bright lights without drawing attention?”

  Alexa looked up. “Varuna, can you explain what the subject in this image is wearing?”

  The disembodied voice of the AI said, “Yes, Alexa. It is an exploit first seen in Hibernity prison, used by prisoners to defeat early facial recognition systems.”

  Hedrick narrowed his eyes. “Used by prisoners?”

  “Correct. The device consists of goggles punctuated by near-infrared LEDs emitting at roughly eight hundred fifty nanometers, which can be found in common motion sensors. This light is invisible to the human eye but matches the spectral sensitivity of CMOS or CCD cameras or other silicon-based photo detectors. When placed around the face, these make it impossible to obtain accurate measurements on the spacing and shape of a subject’s facial features.”

  Hedrick turned back to Morrison meaningfully. “Grady’s obviously received assistance. There is something going on at Hibernity.”

  Alexa looked between the two of them. “What makes you think that?”

  “Mr. Morrison will handle it, Alexa. You just concentrate on locating Mr. Grady.”

  “Without facial recognition, it’ll be difficult.”

  “What about this Agent Davis?”

  “From the moment of her fingerprint match on Grady, she’s been under surveillance by AIs—microphones in her laptop and cell phone, the works. Apparently Mr. Grady requested that she meet him in the Columbia University Mathematics Library a week from today. I took the liberty of using AIs to instruct her through official channels to meet with Grady in New York. She’s to report to a special task force.” Alexa swept her hand through the air and dropped a virtual document onto Hedrick’s desktop.

  He examined the document—an email from the deputy director of the FBI ordering Denise Davis to report to a task force safe house. “If we know where Grady is going to be, why involve her?”

  “Grady might not show if he doesn’t see her.”

  Hedrick looked up from the document. “But why New York?”

  Alexa closed all the holographic windows. “Back when Bertrand Alcot was a physics professor at Columbia, he took Mr. Grady under his wing—mentored him. Grady never attended, but he spent time there. I’m guessing he still has friends in the area—or he knows of someplace there where he can go to ground.”

  “Set AIs loose on any communities of interest his past activity might generate. See what they turn up. Past addresses, run geolocation on his phones for the past ten years. I want anyone he’s ever been with under surveillance.”

  Hedrick then turned to Morrison. “Prep your people to become this FBI unit. Grab him when he shows.”

  Morrison nodded. “You still need him alive?”

  “Yes, damnit!” Hedrick looked back to Alexa. “Excellent job.”

  “I’d like to go on that operation, Graham.”

  He looked surprised. “That’s not up to me, Alexa.” Hedrick turned to Morrison.

  “No.”

  “I feel I’ve earned the right to go on this operation. Mr. Grady represents a grave risk to the BTC and society at large. I think he’ll listen to me.”

  “Ah, you’re going to charm him, like you did to so many in the old days?”

  Hedrick shook his head vigorously. “You’re too valuable, Alexa. It can’t be risked.”

  Morrison added, “And we don’t need your help.”

  Hedrick took her by the elbow. “I need your people monitoring Agent Davis’s every move. Look how well you’ve done so far on the intelligence side.”

  Morrison gave Alexa a sly smirk.

  Alexa focused on Hedrick. “I was a top field operative. It’s what I’m good at. Why won’t you let me do what I’m good at?”

  “You’re much too valuable.”

  She studied him and then turned to exit.

  His words followed her. “You’re dismissed.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Rogue Agency

  The Raven Rock Mountain Complex was intended to deal with end-of-the-world scenarios. For that reason it always put Bill McAllen on edge. Known officially as Site R, it was a continuity of government (or COG) bunker complex in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, not far from the Maryland border. One of many such bunkers built during the Cold War, it had been augmented and expanded over the decades. It was now sometimes called the Underground Pentagon because it served as an emergency command center for various U.S. defense agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the event of a major national crisis.

  As McAllen drove down what seemed like miles of concrete-lined tunnels in an otherwise empty, chauffeured twelve-seat electric cart, he couldn’t stop thinking that this was where some of the last humans might remain alive in the event of global thermonuclear war. Or an asteroid strike. Or a pandemic—name your Armageddon, they probably had a standard-operating-procedures binder for it on a shelf somewhere down here. But the four times he’d been here in the past had been for COG training.

  Today wasn’t training.

  The cart stopped in the tunnel next to an open three-foot-thick steel blast door, flanked by armed sentries. He stepped off and was met by a female army lieutenant from the U.S. Army’s 114th Signal Battalion. “This way, Deputy Secretary.”

  Without waiting for him, she moved quickly through bunkeresque office corridors devoid of people. He hurried to keep up. After walking past dozens of identical metal doors marked with numbers and letters, she finally turned a corner where a podium with the Pentagon seal stood on a dais before dozens of chairs. Several generations of television broadcasting equipment were mothballed against the back wall, but sitting in the chairs were lots of sharp-looking young men and women in suits, tapping away at laptops. None of them so much as glanced up.

  The lieutenant gestured for McAllen to follow her as she approached a conference room flanked by two more armed sentries. She knocked and after a moment entered, moving aside for McAllen.

  “Deputy Secretary McAllen is here, Madam Director.”

  “Bill!”

  In the concrete-walled boardroom McAllen could see several senior representatives of the DHS, NSA, CIA, and Defense Department sitting around a huge and absurdly durable-looking oak table. At its head sat their penultimate boss, Director of National Intelligence Kaye Monahan, a petite woman in her sixties who nonetheless had a commanding presence. McAllen was well aware this small woman had, as U.S. ambassador, more than held her own in brass-knuckle dealings with the Chinese senior leadership. She’d been in the intel community long before that. And she was principled—which McAllen found appealing in a longtime D.C. political player.

  The army lieutenant departed, closing the door behind her. There was a vigorous debate already under way around the conference table.

  Director Monahan motioned for him to sit in an open seat next to her. “Come here and help me talk some sense into these guys.”

  McAllen took his seat while the raucous discussion continued.

  “Kaye, you know damn well no one has the complete picture. That’s what compartmentalization’s all about.” The deputy director of
the CIA was a jowly Virginian in his sixties, sipping a Diet Coke as he scowled across the table.

  “Compartmentalizing an SAP is one thing, but a whole goddamned bureau?”

  A gaunt, intense man, whom McAllen remembered from his days at the NSA, spoke from the far end of the table. “It wasn’t a bureau back when it started. It was a project. And in any event, it was the Company that launched it.”

  The CIA guy cast a look at him. “It could just as well have been any of us.”

  Director Monahan added, “I never heard anything about it while I was at Langley. I knew we had black tech, but . . .”

  The CIA guy gestured to the walls. “Look around you. This is what they were doing in the Cold War—big stuff. Do you realize how much two hundred billion a year for half a century buys you? The president himself doesn’t have the clearance to know about half these programs. There are a million people with top-secret classifications in this country, Kaye. And some of those folks live in a completely different world—even from us. It’s the nature of the covert sector. Back in the ’60s someone put the BTC in charge of regulating advanced technologies, and it snowballed. It looks like they left us all behind.”

  She sipped coffee from an absurdly elegant cup and saucer—legacy ware from the Kennedy administration. “Well, Bill here took the meeting with them—if that’s what you could call it—and I just about had him and the other two certified when I read his report.”

  The NSA guy remained expressionless. “I read it. We’ve known since ’98 that the BTC had perfected holographic projection at molecular scales. We think it’s done with phased array optics and plasma emission. But no one really knows.”

  McAllen raised his eyebrows. “It looked damned real to us.”

  The CIA guy grimaced. “That’s a toy compared to what else they have.”

  Monahan scowled. “There needs to be some accountability. We need to review what technology they’re sitting on that could provide the United States with a technological edge. China’s nipping at our heels.”

  “The BTC might argue that what they’re doing is keeping the tech out of China’s hands.”

  “There is a technology transfer problem in the private sector.”