Wired

by Douglas E. Richards

  Alan Miller walked a few steps to the bar and began pouring himself another drink. He turned to Desh once again. “I recruited Putnam and began building wealth and power all the while my sister was working on extended life. I always knew what she was up to. I made it a point to know, despite the precautions she thought she was taking after my break-in.” He added ice to his glass and returned to his seat. “When Lusetti reported she was closing up shop, I suspected she had made a breakthrough.”

  “So you flew to San Diego to find out,” said Desh.

  “When I learned the secret wasn’t in her computer and would have to be coerced from her, I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. With emphasis on kill,” he added sardonically. “I had been considering faking my own death, anyway, and starting over with a new identity that was off the grid.”

  “And you knew your sister worshipped you. So you decided to pretend to be a hostage and use the threat of your own death as leverage.”

  Alan nodded. “It was a brilliant plan, if I do say so myself.” He paused for a moment and his features hardened. “But I didn’t count on the memory trap she had made,” he growled through clenched teeth. “That fucked everything up.” He swirled his drink and stared at it in his hand, as if mesmerized, until he was icy calm once again.

  “So given the memory blockade, why even bother with Kira?” asked Desh. “Why not just optimize your molecular biologist until he repeated her work, saving yourself the headache?”

  “Because compared to my freak of a sister, he’s a moron. It took him years to duplicate her brain optimization therapy—and he had the instructions. Even enhanced, I doubt there are even three or four scientists in the world who would could duplicate her longevity work.” He shook his head. “No, she was the only game in town. But as if her memory trick wasn’t annoying enough, she managed to kill that dumb bastard Lusetti and vanish from the grid. I’m man enough to admit that this really pissed me off,” he said with apparent calm, but his tone couldn’t fully disguise an unmistakable undercurrent of barely contained rage at this memory, even now. “But only for a short while,” he added. “I regrouped. I took another of her smart pills, and I came up with my grand plan the very next day.”

  “Putnam told us,” said Kira in disgust. “Mass sterilization of women just so you can extend your twisted existence for a few years.”

  Alan laughed. “Mass sterilization?” he repeated in amusement. “Don’t believe everything you’re told.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Kira.

  “That’s because you’re so sanctimonious you refuse to give yourself the very gift you created. If you would have taken one of your own pills, you would have seen through this ruse in an instant.” He shook his head in disappointment. “You really are a lot less intelligent than I remembered.” He spread his hands innocently. “Why would I possibly want to sterilize anybody?”

  She looked confused. “First, to motivate me to unlock my memories.”

  Alan shook his head. “When I enhanced myself after I had faked my death, I pondered the likely properties of your memory prison. I realized right away that no threat, no matter how great, would enable you to crack it.” He gestured toward her encouragingly. “By all means, guess again.”

  “Because if you succeeded—if ours really did become mankind’s last generation—I would be forced to give you my secret for the survival of the species. Or to Putnam, at any rate.”

  “Give it to Putnam?” he hissed, as if outraged. “Give it to me? Kira, you would never give your secret to either one of us. You can only unlock your memory if you truly want to. And you would never want to for me or Putnam. You would bide your time, knowing we wouldn’t kill you, until you could escape. That way you’d make sure we didn’t hoard the secret and use it for our own ends. Make sure the entire world was a beneficiary.” He scowled. “You and I both know that’s what you’d do.”

  Kira nodded. “You’re right,” she acknowledged reluctantly.

  “Of course I am. And if I kept you hostage and tried to force it out of you, I’d be back where I started. Catch 22. So the only way I could get it is if I let you go and you gave it to the entire world.” He paused. “And while this would, indeed, ensure I lived longer along with the rest of the masses, I would lose the use of the most powerful lever in history.” He smiled cruelly. “You see, I’m a little selfish. I want the secret all to myself. To use as I see fit.”

  “I still don’t see it,” said Kira. “The Ebola cold-virus was a bluff. The explosive in my head was a bluff. The sterilization plot was a bluff. Why? How do they all fit together? And what did all of these machinations buy you?”

  Her brother smiled broadly. “As it turns out, Kira … everything.”

  48

  Alan Miller took a sip of his drink, a delighted gleam in his eye, obviously reveling in finally being able to share his warped maneuverings with a rapt audience. He was savoring the telling of a story that would twist the knife in his prisoners over and over again. “As I said, I knew with certainty that you couldn’t be coerced. So I had to ask my unfathomably brilliant transformed self this question: under what conditions would my little sister give up her secret? Once I answered this, all I had to do was establish these conditions.” He rolled his eyes. “A lot easier said than done, I must admit.”

  “So what were the conditions?” asked Kira, but a sick feeling had grown in the pit of her stomach. She realized she had just given Desh the location of the flash drive. She knew exactly what combination of conditions this had taken. But for Alan to suggest he had orchestrated things from the start to bring about these conditions was preposterous. Besides, she had whispered the coordinates directly in Desh’ ear, and no listening device was sensitive enough to catch that.

  “First,” began Alan, “you had to respect someone enough to trust them with your secret. If you were forever a loner and didn’t have anyone to trust, no combination of circumstances would do.”

  He turned to Desh. “That’s where you come in. You were handpicked for this role.”

  “What are you talking about?” snapped Desh in confusion.

  “Who do you think set you up in Iran?” he said smugly, a Cheshire grin on his face.

  “Impossible!” barked Desh. “You’re saying you expected me to team up with your sister even then?”

  Alan Miller nodded. “I wanted to ensure she had someone to confide in. Believe me, Desh, I know my sister’s taste in men. I’ve met the guys she’s dated and she’s told me, in nauseating detail, the kind of man she’s looking for. I studied the records of scores of Special Forces operatives before stumbling onto a ringer like you. You’re her exact type physically. Brilliant in your own right. Personable. You studied philosophy for Christ’s sake. You like poetry. Incredibly well read. Sickeningly righteous.” He grinned. “You’re catnip to her. The transformed me was convinced that if you two were thrown together under desperate circumstances, there’s no way she doesn’t fall in love with you.”

  Alan gazed at his sister knowingly. “Go ahead, Kira. I know I chose well. Tell him. You’re in love with him already.”

  Kira lowered her eyes but said nothing.

  A startled look flashed over Desh’s face, and he appeared totally dumbstruck. His eyes darted to the side as if desperately trying to read Kira’s expression.

  Alan laughed. “I’ll be damned!” he said, studying Desh. “You’re in love with her, also. I can see it in your face.” He laughed again. “I should be a fucking matchmaker.”

  Kira gazed at Desh and her eyes widened. She had been feeling like an idiot, desperately trying to hide her feelings from him, convinced that true love was something that happened over years rather than days. But she sensed her brother, evil as he was, had guessed correctly. Desh had fallen for her as well.

  Alan shifted his attention back to his sister. “I had hoped this would happen. When both parties can subconsciously pick up on each other’s signals of infatuation, the effect is accele
rated. My in-depth study of Desh suggested he liked girl-next-door types who were his match intellectually, but frankly, Kira, I was convinced your irritating personality would turn him off.” He raised his eyebrows. “Despite not having a firsthand knowledge of Desh’s taste in women, my brilliant, transformed self calculated there was a good chance he would fall for you too.” He shook his head in wonder. “Ironic that a being of pure intellect could so accurately predict a largely irrational, involuntary response.”

  “You should feel very proud of yourself,” spat Desh bitterly.

  Alan looked back and forth between his two prisoners and smiled in delight. “What’s the matter, you two? You look angry and confused. Feeling manipulated? Feeling like experimental animals? Does the fact that I orchestrated your feelings for each other to serve my purposes taint them?”

  At this, Desh’s expression became thoughtful, and he shook his head ever so slightly, as though the moment Alan had voiced what he had been feeling, he had realized these feelings were misguided. “No taint Alan. My feelings for Kira are my own. If you were responsible for allowing me to meet such a remarkable woman, than I thank you, regardless of your motives.” Desh paused. “And if you predicted we would fall for each other,” he continued, “so what? Someone might be able to predict my loathing of you, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

  Alan Miller laughed. “Your loathing of me is about to take a sharp turn for the worse,” he said icily. “Allow me to continue. Once I knew you were the right man, I made sure you encountered tragedy, so you would be a wounded soul and would break all ties with other women. To make you more appealing to my sister. After all, what could possibly be more appealing than a tortured, unattached hero?”

  “You really did set us up in Iran, didn’t you?” whispered Desh in horror.

  “Putnam arranged for that particular—what do you grunts like to call it—oh yeah … clusterfuck. He didn’t have any idea why. Those stupid-assed terrorists were well paid to make sure you escaped alive, but they almost blew it. I needed you injured, but not as injured as you were.”

  “You’re saying they let me escape?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did you need me injured? So I’d cut an even more sympathetic figure for Kira?”

  Alan smiled. “I’ll answer that a little later. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. And I really do want to share with you how brilliantly you were both manipulated. After all, you’re the only two people in the world who will ever have a chance to appreciate my mastery.” He paused. “Shall I continue?”

  Desh nodded while Kira glared at her brother hatefully.

  “The optimized me figured there was a fifty-fifty chance Desh would leave the service. Either way, it didn’t really matter to my plan.”

  “If your plan was to get me to team up with Kira, why did you wait so long?”

  “She wasn’t ready yet. I wanted her harried. Chasing her; almost catching her; isolating her. Making her feel persecuted and alone. Crushing her spirit. I needed her primed for the arrival of her white knight. When I judged she was at the end of her rope, I pulled the strings to have you come in.”

  Kira knew this is exactly what had happened. She had recruited David because she was lonely and fatigued. Alan’s execution had been flawless.

  “Are you saying you could have captured her earlier?” said Desh.

  Alan shrugged. “Possibly,” he said. “If I had made more balls-out attempts. I tried to capture her in the early days, but failed. My enhanced self had calculated that if I captured her, tortured her a bit, and then let her find a way to escape, this would accelerate her readiness to seek out an ally like you, and I could move up my time table.” An annoyed look came over his face. “But she was a lot better than I thought she’d be. And when I got close she would take bold risks with her own life to elude capture, which I couldn’t have. So I changed gears and made harassment my primary objective.”

  “How did you get me assigned?” asked Desh.

  Alan grinned. “With the powerful people Putnam and I have in our pockets, it was laughably easy. I had an influential politician with plenty of skeletons in his closet arrange for it all with Connelly’s bosses. And I had long since made sure the identities of all of the agents sent after her were recorded in a database I knew she could breach.”

  “Because you knew she would study them,” said Desh. “You needed her to study them.”

  He nodded. “She studied others that were sent after her without effect, but I knew if she was properly primed and studied your photo and history, she would try to recruit you.”

  Kira Miller felt bile rise in her throat. This thing pretending to be her brother was distilled evil. What twist of fate had led to her parents giving birth to two mutant children: a daughter with unequaled genius for molecular biology and a son born entirely without a conscience.

  “She took the bait just as I knew she would,” boasted Alan. “I had planned on having the two of you captured by my Black Ops dupe, Smith, and held together as prisoners for a few days to allow love to blossom. But you kept eluding him.” Alan shrugged. “Served my purposes anyway. In fact, your escapes from the motel and woods probably cemented your relationship.” A content, self-satisfied expression came over his face. “Then all that was left to do was have Putnam capture you both and pretend to be me, initiating a perfect storm of circumstances that would cause Kira to tell her lover-boy her secret.”

  The helicopter banked, reminding the prisoners they were tearing through the air at great speed to an unknown destination, something easy to forget given the near perfect stillness of the opulent, enclosed cabin. “How did you know you would be able to find us when you needed to?” asked Desh.

  “This is where the need for you to get seriously injured in Iran comes in. We ordered a military surgeon to add a few implants in addition to fixing you up. The orders came from the highest military channels. He was told this was being done because you were a known traitor.” Alan smirked. “He was even told you had set up your own men.”

  Desh lunged forward in fury, his neck catching enough of the wire in front of him to draw blood, if only shallowly. “You sick bastard!” he screamed, his rage finally spilling out.

  Alan Miller continued calmly as if Desh’s outburst had never happened. “The surgeon implanted a tiny, remote homing device on your elbow, just under the skin. The device was designed to lie completely dormant until pinged by a coded signal, upon which point it would activate. You could scan for bugs all you wanted when it was dormant and it wouldn’t register. While the bomb in Kira’s head was a bluff, the advanced receivers Putnam told you about are very real. As Kira well knows, when you’ve taken one of her pills, improving electronics becomes child’s play.”

  “So you could have captured us at any time David was with me?” said Kira in shock.

  “That’s right. But after you avoided capture, I didn’t want to reacquire you too quickly. You two had to have some time to bond.” He paused and watched blood slowly roll down Desh’s neck with fascination. “When you escaped from the safe house, I was forced yet again to alter my plans. I had planned on the two of you remaining prisoners for several days there and then arranging for your escape, with Putnam being killed in the process.” He shrugged. “No matter. I was able to make some adjustments and everything still worked out as planned.”

  “You still don’t have the coordinates,” said Kira defiantly.

  “Don’t I?” said her brother, smirking. “The homing device wasn’t the only thing the surgeon in Iraq implanted when he was operating on Desh. He also gave him cochlear implants—one for each ear. It’s a standard procedure for people deaf or very hard of hearing. Only the implants he received were silicon-chip based recording units. They record digitally and can be downloaded to a computer for playback.” He sipped his drink and smiled. “They have a finite battery life and only record from ten to eighteen hours, depending on the amount of input, so I had these
set to be activated by my signal as well.”

  “And you activated them within the past ten hours, I presume,” said Desh.

  “Right you are,” said Alan happily. “Using the homing device I had implanted, I easily tracked you to Putnam’s house. After all my painstaking planning, at long last I had created the perfect storm.” He gazed at his sister smugly. “A man you trusted and were falling in love with. A credible threat to species survival. And you convinced that you had but minutes to live.”

  Much of the fire had left Kira Miller as the realization hit her with full force that this monster had won. And she had dutifully played her role as the perfect little pawn. She glanced at her bonds and the razor wire at her throat. Escape was impossible. And even if she could escape, what would she do? Would she kill her own brother?

  She clenched her fists. This wasn’t her brother, she told herself forcefully. This was a twisted imposter. Believing this was the only way her psyche could survive a betrayal this vast. Her brother had died in a fire in their childhood home. The monster in front of her was a complete stranger.

  “The finishing touch to my masterpiece,” continued Alan, “was for you to think your arch-enemy was dead.”

  “Why?” said Desh.

  “If Kira suspected a powerful enemy with access to her treatment was still at large, she would have been far less comfortable disclosing the GPS coordinates.” He raised his eyebrows. “Putnam had no idea what my real plan was. Certainly not that his extermination was a key ingredient. With the arch-enemy who had killed your brother dead, you were free to whisper your secret right into Desh’s cochlea.”

  Alan paused to let his prisoners ponder just how utterly they had been manipulated; just how complete his victory.

  “What if Kira hadn’t killed Putnam?”