Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  Either the CIA had someone else in camp, feeding instructions to his implant, or there was a plane—maybe a C-130—circling several miles from the camp, within line of sight, transmitting orders.

  Go right one hundred meters.

  “I’m going,” he muttered, although he knew they couldn’t hear him. “Give me a second you bastards.”

  The tents stood a short distance behind the main bulk of construction activity. A pair of dump trucks rumbled by, loaded with road base. A moment later, an empty dump truck headed in the other direction.

  What was this place? A new diamond mine? A Chinese military base? No, that was silly. And neither of those possibilities explained why you’d need an entire company of Blackwing contractors. The whole country of Namibia only had two million people in an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma put together. And Kaokoland was the empty quarter.

  He turned right, the opposite direction that Kendall had taken, then followed the gravel path, beyond a diesel generator and restrooms. Two guys in orange overalls shaved at the outdoor sink and chatted in Chinese. Ian stopped and held perfectly still just long enough for the implant to record a snippet of their conversation, then continued. He passed more workers a moment later, but the men paid him no attention.

  They’d thrown up a berm on the right side, fresh enough that it was still bare dirt, even though low scrub grew on the other side. The berm ended perpendicular with a concrete wall that blocked the gravel path, about the height of his shoulder.

  Duck behind the wall.

  He ducked, leaned against the wall. It was so new that he could still smell the curing cement. His body seemed to contract and he was fully inside his head again. The implant was quiet now, passive. A low conversation came to his ears from the other side.

  Got to be a Spooky. AC-130U. Infrared would pick up the hot white lights of bodies on the other side of the cement barrier, had no doubt followed them from elsewhere in the camp and instructed Ian to follow, eavesdrop.

  “…same rate,” said a voice in English, British accent. “Three more that size, already capped, pending infrastructure. Mid-range estimate is 32 GB of BOE.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the estimated URR?” The second voice had a German accent, or maybe Scandinavian. Ian wasn’t sure.

  “That is the URR. Current technology, nothing too funky. And it’s 38 degrees API.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Hell if I know. Li Hao is playing it like a trophy fish at this point. He doesn’t dare reel it in too fast or it will break the line.”

  “You mean the Namibian government.”

  “No, I’m talking about the Americans.”

  “Ah, I got it. Well pretty soon it will be too late, even for the Americans.”

  They moved away from the concrete wall and Ian was left confused. Words, lots of words, and in English. But he had no idea what they’d been talking about.

  Climb over the wall. Follow at a distance.

  Ian rose, glanced over the wall and could see the shadows of the two men, walking away slowly, still talking. He hoisted himself to the top and then something that felt like a giant hand grabbed him.

  Go, now. Run.

  Ian only paused for a moment at the abrupt change of instructions. Why? He hadn’t been detected; had Kendall been discovered?

  Again, he suffered the feeling of being torn in two and lost his balance on top of the wall, fell over the other side. He landed on his back with a grunt. The two men heard him and turned around.

  “Hey, what’s this? You okay, mate?”

  But Ian was back on his feet. He turned and walked away in a hurry.

  Back over the wall. Go. Now left. Over the berm.

  In the distance, he heard a shout, then the sound of a helicopter lifting into the air. A floodlight swept across the berm and the instructions changed abruptly and sent him back the way he’d come. Trucks passed through the camp with swinging search lights. What the hell? Had they discovered him already?

  He wanted to cut straight into the desert, toward the weapons cache. That’s what Kendall would think, assuming he’d been given the same order to run.

  But he trusted the instructions now. The eye in the sky tracked enemy movements and fed him the information.

  Ten o’clock. Turn and run. There’s a ditch.

  He ducked into the ditch and scrambled through a culvert that passed under a road. A small animal scurried out, disturbed by the intruder. He scrambled up the other side, but then the instructions came to return the way he’d come. A truck crunched down the road toward him, brights shining.

  He doubled back. The instructions grew more and more inconsistent and Ian knew he was in trouble. The eye in the sky couldn’t find a safe passage. There were too many enemies.

  He crouched down, listening to the sound of his breath. He could feel the sweat on his forehead, beading up over the scars above his hairline. He tapped his fingers: middle, ring, ring, thumb, middle, index. Had to get control of his breathing, stop the fear that closed around his throat.

  Kak! Where was Kendall?

  His breathing slowed. He concentrated on what he could hear. Footsteps. Two pair. Dogs, barking. He flattened his body against the side of the culvert. A beam of light shot through the open end and glanced off the far wall.

  “Come out! Slowly!”

  Ian looked out the culvert at the barrel of an AK-47. He crawled out slowly. He was dead.

  He emerged into the dusk to see three German shepherds drooling and snarling next to the man at the other end of the AK-47. A second man had another AK-47 targeted unflinching at his head. They held him at gunpoint until more men arrived, who dragged Ian onto the road. The voice in his head was silent.

  Paul-Henri Dupont arrived by truck within minutes. “I should have trusted my gut. Your background check was good, your answers perfect, but something was wrong. I knew it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I got lost on my way to the bathrooms and then guys with guns started to chase me. Yeah, I started to run. You would’ve too.”

  “So it’s just chance? Two hours after you came into camp, we pick up incoming signals, but that came from someone else, right?” Dupont gave a nod and two men jerked Ian to his feet. “You’ve got some sort of recording device on you. I don’t know where you hid it, but I’m going to find it, even if I have to dissect you centimeter by centimeter.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Julia came into the animal lab to find one of the macaques screaming in its cage. She avoided the lab, except when necessary, as she found the caged animals depressing and the noise distracting.

  And then there was the smell. On good days it smelled like ammonia and formaldehyde. On bad days, feces and urine. Julia could deal with that; medical school had cured her of her natural squeamishness. But in the last week, another DARPA team had moved a row of stackable cages into the back corner, with rats that continually gnawed at food pellets or scratched at the lids to try to escape. Must have been thirty of them. And all those rats gave off a smell that was worse than any number of cadavers, pickled pig fetuses, or monkey poop. It made her stomach churn.

  There were six primates in cages along the right wall—three baboons and three macaques. Before moving on to Ian and Kendall, Julia had practiced the implant surgery on their brains. There had been a few hitches, most notably one baboon that still suffered seizures and a macaque with a thrombosed vein that had induced a small stroke, but each surgery had been labeled a success. The patients had lived, the implants performed to spec. Now over a year following the first implant, the endoscopic technique was becoming easier for her.

  The animals were rattling their cages and one macaque in particular kept throwing himself into the door. He bared his teeth and screeched.

  A man in a white lab coat stood in front of the cage. He didn’t appear to be doing anything unusual, just fiddling with a laptop and pointing a wireless probe at the monkey’s skull. But it drove the monkey craz
y.

  “Hey, you,” she said. “What are you doing to him?”

  The man turned with a start. It was the software engineer who had shown up after Ian Westhelle’s surgery to “upgrade” the firmware. Hubert Chang.

  She had seen him coming and going from Markov’s office over the last two weeks, even saw him enter a secure conference in the atrium with the deputy director of intelligence for the CIA and Sarah Redd, the Director of National Intelligence.

  Julia asked her husband about Chang, but Terrance had shrugged it off. “Nah, he’s nobody. Well, that’s not true. He’s a nerd’s nerd, the kind who thinks in binary and optimizes code in his sleep. We need guys like that these days, but they’re not the decision makers.”

  Chang shut the laptop and tucked the probe into the pocket of his lab coat. “You mean, why is the ape freaking out?”

  “Monkey. Macaques are monkeys, baboons are apes.”

  “Monkey, whatever. I took out his food tray while he was eating. Couldn’t get a good signal with the jaw movements. Guess he was hungry.”

  She gave the macaque a suspicious glance. It had started to calm down. This particular animal was the most docile of the bunch. Seemed unlikely to go berserk over something like a removed food tray.

  “But what are you doing with the probe anyway?”

  “Just extracting log files. One of our log channels is skipping a non-critical code block that should be executing when the subject enters REM sleep.”

  “How does that matter?” she asked. “This guy doesn’t even have the newest implant. Markov told me we were going to deactivate their implants and retire them to a sanctuary, then bring in some new animals.”

  “But since they’re disposable,” Chang said, “the powers that be decided to make some software modifications, save us some headaches for the next round.”

  “What powers that be? Who are you talking about?”

  He shrugged. “Hey, they don’t tell me anything. I just follow orders.”

  Following orders or not, he’d avoided assigning responsibility to anyone or anything. Probably Markov’s doing, she decided. Over the last six months, he’d gradually eroded her involvement in the applications side of the implants. Claimed it was too complex for one person to do everything. There were dozens of investigators working on decoding the signals sent by each of the six cortical arrays. She should focus on perfecting the surgical technique.

  Fine, but not here. Not in her lab.

  “Since you like orders so much, here’s one,” she said. “You want to touch my animals, you talk to me first.”

  “Whatever,” he said. Then, when she put her hands on her hips and refused to move, he added, “Okay, fine. Heaven forbid I mess with your monkeys.”

  ________

  Julia came home for dinner intending to ask Terrance for more details about Chang. Who exactly did he report to, and how could she get put in the decision loop about matters such as software upgrades to existing implants?

  Julia walked into their bedroom to put away her jacket and glanced at her nightstand with a frown. A pile of books and papers overflowed in stacks onto the floor next to some old Chinese takeout containers. She’d set out a few months back to understand some of the software algorithms used for the implants, but she felt more confused than ever about support vector machines. Too much to learn. No time. She walked into her closet where her clothes were organized by season and by color and hung her jacket. The unexpected smell of Indian food pulled her out of daydreaming as soon as she returned to the hall. She’d missed lunch again through stress and inattention. The onion and ginger changed her mood instantly.

  Terrance smiled when Julia entered the kitchen. There were bowls of chicken korma and basmati rice, and even garlic naan, but she couldn’t see takeout containers anywhere.

  “You made all this?” He was a good cook, but hadn’t done anything this elaborate in months. Early in their marriage he would cook for her frequently, but her coming home well past dinner time all throughout residency had put a stop to that practice. “When did you have time?”

  “No, I didn’t make it, not exactly.”

  “Ah, so it is takeout. I was wondering.”

  “Not as such.” He smiled, and she could see that he was proud of whatever he’d pulled off. “It’s our new delivery service. Come on, give me a hand while it’s still hot.”

  Terrance explained while they set the table in the breakfast nook. He’d contracted with a service that came into the house and prepared meals using their own kitchen, then cleaned up and disappeared before the Nolans came home from work. Terrance had selected a menu for the month, which included many of Julia’s favorite foods.

  “Sounds great,” she said. “But expensive. Our own private cooks for five dinners a week? Are you sure we can afford it?”

  “Sure we can. I told you, we’re doing fine. We’re both working. You’re a brain surgeon for crying out loud. Relax.” He ladled korma over his rice, then took a bite. “Wow, give that a taste. It’s got a kick but it’s damn good.”

  It tasted every bit as good as it smelled. With the best meal she’d had in days and the window open to let in the soothing sound of the stream, she could almost convince herself that everything was okay with their marriage. Terrance had found a great deal on a house when property values dived, a short commute from Langley with several acres of woods. The owners had been getting a divorce, Terrance said, and needed a quick sale, which meant slashing the price in the current market.

  Apart from the previous owners’ divorce, which seemed like a bad omen, Julia was happy with their luck. She kept telling herself that things would come around. But that was five months ago and things were just as tense as before. Julia tore off a piece of naan and sopped it in her korma sauce. “That software guy was sniffing around the animal lab today.”

  “Which software guy?”

  “You know who I’m talking about. Hubert Chang. Claimed he was extracting log files, but he managed to really piss off the macaque.”

  “He’s a software engineer. I talk to those guys and it feels almost like we’re communicating. I swear half of them have Asperger Syndrome. Anyway, you can’t expect him to have good bedside manners with a monkey when he can barely interact with real humans.”

  “But what was he doing down there?”

  “Uhm, sounds like he was extracting log files.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” she said. “And you know more about what’s going on here than you’re telling me. I checked out the specs for the implants and the docs haven’t changed since before the human implants. But then Chang comes along and he’s fiddling with the software and nobody will tell me why, or how.”

  Terrance sighed. “Come on, Julia, you know we can’t talk about this. Not here. In fact, you’ve gone too far already.”

  “So if we go back to the lab, to a secure place, you’ll tell me everything you know, right?”

  “What would Markov say?” Terrance said.

  “NTK.”

  “That’s right. Need to know.”

  “Dammit, I’m chief investigator on this project. Exactly what don’t I need to know?”

  “And if the modifications had anything to do with the physical specifications of the implant, then you’d know, I’m sure. But it’s just software and that’s beyond your purview. Besides,” Terrance added in a more gentle tone, “I don’t know anyway. My scope is operational in nature, which means I know even less than you do about technical specifications of the implant. My job is to make sure those guys complete their mission and return alive.”

  “And you can’t tell me anything about that, either, I suppose. Can you at least tell me if they’re doing okay?”

  “They’re fine. Better than fine because they’re the best we’ve got. Really, don’t worry about them.”

  Julia pushed away her plate of food. She wasn’t exactly full, but her appetite was gone nevertheless.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The woman with
the latex gloves was back. They’d strapped Ian and Kendall into chairs and the woman told Ian to open his mouth while she prodded at his teeth and then looked up his nasal cavity. His mind spun through options. Only chance was to cooperate and hope Dupont started to second guess himself.

  “It’s on them,” Dupont said. “It has to be. We took their truck and gave them new clothes. That means it has to be physically on their bodies.”

  “If it is, I’ll find it,” she said.

  Dupont muttered something in French, then said, “That’s what you were supposed to do last time, remember?”

  Unlike the tent, where they’d been given their last inspection, this was a permanent concrete building. It looked new, like the wall that he’d crouched behind to eavesdrop. Exposed wiring stretched across the ceiling and the floor was bare and dusty, except for a couple of area rugs tossed down near the entrance by a computer server array in the corner. Two Blackwing guards stood posted at the door.

  “You’re paranoid,” Kendall said. “Whatever is going on here, it has nothing to do with us.” Ian’s friend didn’t look so good. There was bruising around his eyes and a trickle of dried blood at his lip.

  “He’s right,” Ian said. “Maybe you’ve got a mole. Could be anyone in the camp. One of the Chinese guys, probably. Think about it. If we came here to spy on you, would we have been so bleeding stupid as to have sent radio broadcasts when we just got here? Why would we do that?”

  Yes, why? Someone out there had screwed up and now Ian and Kendall were paying for it. Completely unacceptable. They’d been totally unprepared for the mission, with no operational control. That would never have happened to a Ranger platoon commander.

  Ian thought about the satellite dishes. They must be part of a sophisticated anti-snooping system. These days the private contractors, accountable only to their corporate masters, had tools at their disposal that one normally equated only with elite military units or national security agencies. The woman with the gloves moved to Ian’s scalp. She traced along his hairline, behind his ears and then started to pick through his hair. He forced his breathing to remain calm and even, his wrists relaxed in the restraints.