The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  Protégé had helped. Throughout his years-long friendship with the old tycoon, Protégé had always had the feeling he was being groomed, molded for something specific. As it turned out, he was right.

  He’d risen quickly through the General Electronics Government Services Division ranks to run the division, plucked from the crowd of capable managers in the company’s stable. Protégé had always wondered whether his meteoric rise hadn’t had something to do with his acquaintance with the old gray fox, but his vanity didn’t permit him too much rumination in that direction. Clearly, his success was due to his unique combination of skills. Two standard deviations above average. Top two percent. Those were his common headlines, anyway.

  Truth be told, it probably didn’t hurt that he was well connected, thought it was through no doing of his own. Archive had chosen him, not the other way around.

  They’d had innumerable lengthy philosophical discussions in the old man’s lavish mansion on the outskirts of DC. Archive’s style was often collegial, occasionally didactic, but sometimes downright patronizing. Protégé endured the annoying times in the way an heir endures the more tiresome elements of an eccentric patriarch’s ways.

  But those times were rare enough that they didn’t grate on the young executive’s nerves too badly, and he certainly felt that he’d gained much more than he’d given to the relationship. Not everyone got the chance to study at the feet of one of the world’s richest and most accomplished men.

  But Protégé was troubled. “We’ve uncorked quite a genie. I’m concerned about what’s happening.”

  Allison nodded her assent, curling up against Protégé’s chest for shelter against the growing chill, gazing out at the lingering colors of a nearly-spent sunset. He caught her scent, enjoying the stir it caused within him despite the troubling topic on his mind.

  Archive cocked his head upward, exhaling. More expensive cigar smoke mingled with the smell of the mountain. “I am too. I’m afraid we’ll see the darker side of our nature for a while.”

  “They’ll fillet us if they figure out we’re responsible.”

  “When.” There was a twinkle in the old man’s eye. “It’s inevitable. Entropy demands that they figure it out. It’s not a question of if, but when.”

  “So you’ve signed us all up for martyrdom?”

  The old man laughed. “Of course not. To the extent that anyone among us has ‘signed up,’ the rules of our little coterie demanded that we did so of our own volition.”

  He took a long drag of his cigar. Straight to the lungs, Protégé noticed.

  “But I don’t think we’ll be massacred or hung at dawn,” Archive said. “It’s all about the narrative.”

  “Which you’ll control exactly how?”

  An amused smile, a twinkle, and a puff of cigar, then, “Inconceivable as it may seem as we sit here together right now, I’m not altogether unaccustomed to giving public sentiment a helpful nudge in the right direction.”

  “Clearly. But this is a bit of a doozy.”

  Archive nodded, eyes still twinkling. “Acquiring skills is amusing and entertaining in and of itself, but I fail to see the point if one doesn’t draw upon one’s unique talents when history affords one the opportunity.”

  That was the annoying Archive that Protégé occasionally endured. He did so with silence. Spiritual exercise.

  A quiet electric motor whirred nearby, drawing the automatic windows shut. The dwelling controlled its own climate, but not by brute force. It regulated the amount of breeze and sun it allowed inside at various times during the day. The thick brick construction absorbed the sun’s daytime energy and radiated it into the building at night, and the louvered windows opened and shut of their own accord to prevent the building from becoming too warm. Sure, the mountain climate demanded they burn fuel on occasion to keep sufficiently warm, but the efficiency numbers were through the roof. The sounds of the self-regulating building reminded Protégé that they were in perhaps the best place on the planet to weather the coming storm.

  The current storm, he corrected himself.

  Archive’s phone rang. Vivaldi ringtone. “Art, my scoundrel of a partner in crime,” Archive answered jovially. “When will you grace us with your presence?”

  Protégé thought of the previous evening. He’d spent a portion of it inside a dilapidated wind tunnel on a former NASA research facility, now an air force base in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Protégé had delivered the hardware he’d stolen from his own company in DC, and Art Levitow, brilliant quantum physicist and government employee turned conspirator, mated those stolen goods with another stolen article flown in hastily from Fort Worth, Texas.

  Thus, from a grand jury’s perspective, there wasn’t much separation between Protégé and the current worldwide crisis. In fact, Protégé mused darkly, one could argue that a very clear cause-and-effect relationship existed between the way he’d spent the previous evening, and the way the world was spending this particular evening: broke, broken, and panicked.

  “Are the reports of atavism true?” Archive asked into the phone.

  Atavism? Strange word, Protégé thought. You mean, has the herd gone completely nuts?

  “Okay, Art, thank you. Please take care of yourself. I’ll work on provisioning your return trip. And congratulations again on all you’ve accomplished. It is an important day, thanks to your brilliance.” The call ended.

  Protégé asked a question with his eyebrows, and Archive answered: “Stuck on the East Coast. He has plenty of cash, which the jet service company is still accepting, but the company’s distribution system is apparently linked directly to its billing system, which is floating face-down at the moment, for obvious reasons.”

  “So he’s stuck?”

  “For the moment. The Gulfstream can easily round-trip without refueling, so I’ll have the crew go fetch him.”

  Archive rose. “I hate to interrupt the moment, but it’s time for us to provide that nudge we spoke of earlier. Art says the rioting rumors are quite true, which is a little unfortunate. But certainly accommodated in our planning.”

  “Meet Trojan,” Archive said.

  Protégé shook hands with a small, slight, bookish man in his early thirties. Trojan didn’t make much eye contact, and his grip was a little too dead-fish for Protégé’s taste. “Nice to meet you,” Trojan said to the floor, which reminded Protégé of the joke about the extroverted computer scientist: he talks to your shoes instead of his own.

  “Don’t let his unassuming manner fool you,” Archive beamed. “Trojan is a lion.”

  The lion blushed and shuffled his feet nervously.

  “Did you build the virus?” Protégé asked.

  “Did the nickname give it away?”

  Protégé smiled. He liked a little sarcasm. Evidence of the spark of life, he always thought.

  “As you’re undoubtedly aware,” Archive said, “there was more going on over the weekend than I told you about explicitly.”

  Protégé nodded. “Clearly.”

  “Trojan built the virus that delivered the decryption algorithm.”

  “Who built the algorithm?”

  Archive’s eyes twinkled again. “Big Brother. At least, they contracted to have it built. I’m sure they didn’t envision their little pet project ever being used to hobble the banking system.”

  Protégé shook his head. “I don’t even want to know the rest.”

  Archive looked at Trojan. “Rested? Ready for more fun?”

  “Sure,” the skinny hacker said. “My nerves aren’t frazzled enough. Any chance they’re on to us?”

  Archive laughed. “Of course. Only a matter of time. But what they do with us when they figure it out is what’s important. That’s where you come in.”

  Trojan sat down at a desktop computer and started clicking keys. Protégé saw a number of ugly black windows with green lettering open up on the monitor, cursors blinking as if to mark the time.

  “How big is the botnet today
?” Archive asked.

  “The what?” Protégé asked.

  “Botnet. Robot network,” Trojan said. “Slave computers, taken over by the virus. Looks like it’s around two hundred and seventy million.”

  Protégé looked confused.

  “Trojan’s virus spreads in innocuous communications, then hijacks the computer’s processor,” Archive explained. “Makes the user’s computer run a bit more slowly, but not noticeably so, and there are really no overt indications that one’s computer is engaged in a bit of a dalliance. In this case, all of that extra processing power has been marshaled to run the decryption algorithm.”

  Protégé shook his head. “So who controls them all?”

  Trojan smiled. “Some guy I know real well.”

  “How?”

  “You’re looking at it,” Trojan said, typing a command into one of the old-school computer terminal windows.

  “From right here?”

  Trojan laughed. “Where else did you expect?”

  “Some roomful of computers somewhere, I guess.”

  Archive clapped Protégé on the shoulder. “It’s a world I don’t understand well, either,” he said. “But I’m glad Trojan does.”

  Trojan’s computer chirped. “We’re in.”

  “In where?” Protégé asked.

  Archive beamed. “Now that banking has ceased, Trojan has invited himself into the most powerful place remaining on the planet.”

  Protégé felt bewildered again.

  “Hearts and minds, my boy,” Archive patronized cryptically. “Hearts and minds.”

  He turned to Trojan. “Proceed, if you please.”

  12

  Office of the Commander, USAF Air Combat Command, Hampton, Virginia

  Sam sat at a large conference table in a giant office. A huge mahogany desk dominated one end, a conference table stood in the middle, and a sitting area occupied the remaining third of the space. Had to be eight hundred square feet. A large flat-screen TV hung from the wall, and a muted 24/7 news station banged away silently.

  A large piece of glass topped the conference table, and beneath it, unit insignia representing hundreds of different military organizations were arrayed neatly in rows. “All yours?” Sam asked, pointing at the display.

  General Mark Hajek nodded. “Just shy of a hundred and forty thousand souls.”

  “Heady stuff,” Sam said.

  The general shook his head. “Not if you’re worth a shit.”

  “Point taken. Anyway, thanks for your hospitality.”

  “Happy to help.” Sam got the distinct impression that the general was anything but.

  The trip south from DC had been brutal. All told, it had taken nine hours, three times the normal commute. Sam had once again become acquainted with the stupider, darker side of humanity, the side that lets fear replace thought. How easily we forget, she thought dozens of times as she witnessed one rage-filled automotive near-assault after another, that cooperation is humankind’s best – and only – survival mechanism.

  Sam cut to the chase. “So my guys tell me that the beam that disabled the satellites came from this area.”

  “My guys told me you were direct.”

  “There’s a satellite downlink station here, isn’t there?”

  The four-star nodded. “There is. I had the same thought. But no, the energy didn’t originate from there. No way it could produce that kind of juice. It’s built to receive faint signals from satellites in orbit.”

  “But the dishes are large enough to produce that kind of a beam, aren’t they?”

  “Sure are,” Hajek said. “And you’re asking all the right questions. I asked them of my people earlier today. But the power sources aren’t strong enough to propagate that kind of waveform. Or control it. Thermal bloom is a problem, according to my chief scientist.”

  A colonel came into the room to refresh the general’s coffee. Sam politely demurred the offer for a top-off. It was a little after ten p.m. She was going to have to sleep soon, and the last thing she needed was a caffeine buzz.

  “Something else, too,” Hajek offered. “The satellite facility on base is a mile away, on the other side of the runway. The coordinates we got from NSA don’t resolve to that side of the installation.”

  Sam’s eyebrows arched. She waited for the general to answer the implicit question.

  “Across the street,” Hajek said.

  “Those old wind tunnels?” Sam asked.

  The general nodded. “And there’s a marina over there, too.”

  Sam thought for a second. “So maybe they motored into the marina, zapped a few birds, then cracked a beer and chugged away down the bay.”

  “Maybe,” Hajek said.

  “Your security people don’t patrol that area?”

  The general’s jaw twitched. “They do. No reports of suspicious boating activity.”

  “So they drove the device on and off base?”

  “That appears to be the other alternative.”

  Sam shook her head. “One other alternative. There is also a runway here. Are you sure they didn’t fly it in?”

  The general gave her a hard look. “Good question, Miss.”

  “Special Agent.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Special Agent Jameson. Many men your age resort to chauvinism when they feel a little bit threatened by a woman my age and in my position. But you should tread lightly in my case. I can be a raging bitch. I’d like to see the flight logs and manifests for all of your traffic over the past five days.”

  Hajek shook his head. “Sorry. Classified.”

  “Bullshit,” Sam said. “You know I’m cleared.” Her eyes narrowed a bit. “They told me you were copied on the note between Homeland and Defense. True?”

  Hajek eyed her.

  “Look, whatever happened here, we’re going to figure it out eventually anyway,” she said. “So you might consider how you’d like to be perceived when that happens. Right now, you smell a lot like part of the problem.”

  The four-star considered. He didn’t strike Sam as stupid, which meant that he was testing her with his recalcitrance. Maybe he’d have been able to intimidate a different kind of investigator with his rank, but Sam didn’t usually feel much in the way of deference for rank and power. She gravitated more toward the bull-in-a-china-shop approach in those circumstances. Maybe slightly scorched-earth on occasion, she realized, thinking of the kneecap she’d blown away a little less than twenty-four hours earlier.

  Hajek pushed a button on his phone. The colonel reappeared. “Show the special agent to base operations, please. Relay my approval for her to review all the flight logs.”

  Sam stood up and shook the general’s hand. “Thanks,” she said. “As a courtesy, I’ll let you know what I find.”

  As she followed the seeing-eye colonel out of the giant office, something strange caught her eye. The newscast had been replaced by a still picture, a cartoon. It was one she recognized, but she couldn’t think of where she’d seen it before.

  “Please change the channel on your way out,” Hajek called to the colonel. “Looks like the damn leftist newsies went on the fritz.”

  The colonel futzed with the remote, turning to the right-wing station. It showed the same picture, of an old man with a large mustache, wearing a tuxedo and a large top hat, carrying bags full of money. He was winking.

  Sam finally figured out where she’d seen the cartoon before. That’s Monopoly Man. The character adorned the box of the most popular board game in history.

  The colonel switched channels again, this time settling on a local news station, with the same result. He tried a few more, but Monopoly man’s mischievous grin greeted them at each stop.

  Suddenly the cartoon started moving. He danced around, dollar bills flying out of the moneybags. “Turn the sound up,” Hajek commanded.

  Music was playing. Sam recognized it instantly. The Entertainer, the familiar tune made famous by the con movie, The Sting. One o
f her favorites.

  The music quieted. Monopoly Man stopped dancing, stood square, dropped his sacks full of cash, and placed his hands on his hips. Then he wagged a finger at the camera, and spoke in a comical old-man voice. “Silly. So silly. So much silliness going on out there right now. Silly, silly, silly.” The cartoon figure’s head shook back and forth.

  “We’ve lost our way, haven’t we?” the figure asked rhetorically. The video had the aesthetic of a 1960’s US propaganda piece, extolling the virtues of Thalidomide, lead paint, and other modern miracles.

  Sam glanced at the general, who watched silently, transfixed.

  “We’ve come to believe that money is something,” Monopoly Man said. “But money, currency, cash… it’s actually nothing. Nothing at all. Zip. Zilch. Money is just a symbol. It symbolizes an agreement between us. That’s what’s important. The agreement.”

  The character shifted, and put on a frown. “The old money had been corrupted and turned against us. So it needed to go. You probably didn’t realize it, but you were trapped.”

  The cartoon figure put on a wide smile. “But now, today, you’re free.” He spread his arms wide and danced a little jig. “You can thank me later.” He winked.

  Abruptly, he frowned again, and wagged his finger. “But you need to stop misbehaving, and act your age instead of your shoe size.”

  He paused for an affected chuckle before continuing. “Before you steal from your neighbor or throw a rock through your bank’s window, ask yourself a question: Because money is not a real thing, and because it’s just the symbol of an agreement between us, couldn’t we just use a different symbol for the same agreement?”

  The music started to play again quietly in the background, and the mischievous smile returned to Monopoly Man’s face. “I’ll leave you all to ponder. But I shall return.” He winked, then danced away.

  Hajek fumed. “God help them if I ever catch them. Those bastards are taunting us.”