by J D Lasica
After that, for years he ran a training school in the sticks of Alabama, giving operatives hands-on instructions in the finer points of clandestine operations. Although Lost Camp’s main building had a big bulletin board filled with photos of graduates who’d gone on to serve in the U.S. military’s Special Forces, Conrad mentioned that he was indifferent about what his recruits did with their training. If they ran off and joined the Russians, that was fine with him. As long as they were combat ready for special ops, he had done his job.
Conrad’s lack of devotion to flag and country were less important than his personal loyalty to Sterling J. Waterhouse. After Blackburn kept prodding him to hire Conrad, what cinched the deal in Waterhouse’s mind was that Gregor Conrad was more than ready to pay back the powers that be. Conrad wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.
“Let’s go over each operation again,” Waterhouse said.
Conrad had mapped out every detail of the operation with the forty team commanders. For the umpteenth time, Waterhouse began to grill Conrad about every aspect of the plan. Waterhouse tried poking holes in it. He tossed out unlikely scenarios. He conjured up far-fetched chains of events. He peppered Conrad with questions about contingencies, fallback positions. Waterhouse wanted reassurances that there was nothing—not the smallest molecule of detail—they had overlooked.
Conrad had all the answers. Over his career, Conrad had built up a large network of contacts in the mercenary world, and he had no trouble enlisting recruits who had stashed away a huge arsenal of surplus special weapons. The fact that a billionaire was bankrolling the grave teams meant Conrad didn’t have to cut the usual corners.
They were ready for tomorrow night.
“Did I mention that I redeployed some of our trackers for the grave teams and for our fulfillment operation?” Conrad asked.
“You’ll be able to juggle all this, yes?”
“Of course.”
“You know, if you learned how, you could offload some of your operational oversight to Number Six. ”
Waterhouse knew Conrad was old school and didn’t take advantage of Number Six nearly as often as he should. He still preferred armed guards patrolling the grounds over surveillance drones or other whiz-bang techno-wizardry, and he kept putting off a training session with Harrison on how to make use of the AI. Old habits die hard. Waterhouse and Harrison were the only senior execs who took regular advantage of what the AI had to offer.
“I’m good,” Conrad said, suppressing a frown.
“Looks like you have things well in hand. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Waterhouse headed out the door, across Birthrights Plaza, and toward Sharon Sullivan’s office in Birthrights Tower. He had decided to fill her in on the broad outlines of the grave missions—without giving away any specific targets. She would need to clear her schedule for the debrief he was planning for his inner circle after the extractions.
So much to do. His mind flitted from one action item to another. The new line of Incubots. The expansion in China. The go-to-market plans. The trackers and the data collection operation in Moldova. The next delivery of newborns to Petrov—the deadline was only three days away!
But for the next day, none of this mattered. One thing required his attention. He would bring his entire focus to bear on tomorrow night’s grave team operations.
38
Dallas, August 28
K aden knew she wouldn’t survive the morning and afternoon in her store-bought business suit, so after their sit-down with the genetic counselor, she and Nico changed into their regular uniform of T-shirt, jeans, and tennies before setting off to scout out the Birthrights Unlimited campus. As long as they stayed on the designated walking paths, they wouldn’t arouse suspicion.
By the time the tour group formed at four p.m., they’d already used their Eyewear, via a mesh network and encrypted satellite uplink, to transmit images of the building complexes that had been pixelated on Google Earth back to the B Collective team.
The tour guide, a kid about Kaden’s age but with far fewer miles, took her, Nico, and three couples on an hourlong swing through the Nursery, Birthing Center, and the main Data Operations building, where they got a quick look at a hologram created by something called a Virtual Profile Simulator. They finished up with a tour of Birthrights Tower and a glass of champagne on the Rooftop Garden.
The afternoon’s goal was to look for vulnerabilities and access points. Tonight’s preliminary plan called for Nico to penetrate the internal network and Kaden to scout out the Genomics Lab and Data Operations to see if she could get a sense of what this place was really about.
Kaden pulled Nico aside as the tour was about to wrap up. “What do you think?”
“I think the targets we’re looking for aren’t going to be part of a campus tour,” Nico said.
They headed back to their rental house at the west edge of the campus and began mapping out a game plan for that night.
There was a lot of ground to cover, so Kaden proposed that after nightfall she’d do a sweep of the Lab while Nico would start exploring the Data Zone.
“My mind keeps going to that military-grade network architecture we spotted in our hack,” Nico said. “It looks like they’re putting nothing in the cloud, so they must be storing massive amounts of data on their local quantum array. The question is, why?”
Birthrights didn’t offer maps of the campus, so Kaden used a big yellow notepad and sketched out the layout of the buildings they’d seen today. They figured a computer network this secure wouldn’t share space with administrative offices in the main Data Operations building. No, it would require a dedicated building tied to a secure local area network so that the data techies and lab scientists could access the data at any time.
“Wait.” Kaden pulled out her phone. “Did you notice that building at the far end of the Data Zone with no markings? It wasn’t part of the tour but you could see it from a distance.”
She found the shot, discreetly taken with her smartphone, and showed it to him—the low-slung brick building with large dark glass windows. “This one. ”
Nico nodded. “I’ll start there. If we don’t find the nerve center, we may not get our answers. I’m pretty sure their internal network is air-gapped—physically set apart from any cables or wires that connect to the Internet. Remember the time the NSA hacked the fiber optic links to create a backdoor to Google and Yahoo’s data centers?”
Kaden vaguely recalled reading about that in one of her hacker forums. “I think so.”
“If I can add an implant to the master router, it’ll give us eyes on everything happening inside this company. You can’t hack it from the outside, so I need physical access. Then things could get real interesting.”
Genius!
They spent another three hours mapping out their plan of action, devising different scenarios, reviewing comms and timelines, identifying critical uncertainties, and making vulnerability assessments of targeted buildings. They also drew on some new visual imagery of the business campus that B Collective pulled together from social media photos. Their best bet was to wait for nightfall when security cameras were less likely to spot two dark-clad figures.
They finished their scenario planning over a light home-cooked dinner, then got dressed into their special ops surveillance garb with camo pants and lightweight bulletproof Kevlar tops. For tonight they’d leave their sniper rifles here and bring their laser-sight handguns instead.
By the time they finished packing their go bags, darkness had begun to fall.
39
Minsk, Belarus, August 28
S ophia Navitski raised her hand extra high. Three seats over, she saw that her twin sister Yulia also shot her arm into the air, but Sophia really, really wanted to answer the instructor’s question, so she flounced her blond hair and began waving her hand with such intensity that she just had to be called on.
Sitting at the front of the classroom in the Minsk Children’s Home and Family Se
rvices, Katarina Gorka repeated the question. “At your first private dinner party, what are the correct steps when sitting down to a meal? Sophia.”
“Well, first you smile and say how lovely everything is. And then you put the napkin on your lap. And then you have to wait for the host to start eating before you can take a bite.”
She waited nervously to see how she’d done.
“Yes! Perfect!” Miss Gorka said.
Phew! She smiled and shot a triumphant look over at her dark-haired twin, who wrinkled her nose in jealousy .
Sophia considered herself the most gifted student in class. And hadn’t she proved it three weeks ago when she was one of the six girls selected to fly out with Miss Gorka to the Caribbean island and she was picked to be lead singer in front of a roomful of important grownups?
That trip woke her up and opened her senses to a whole new world. New sights! New tastes! New smells! And the people! The people she met after her performance were nothing like the familiar faces in the Home she’d seen day in and day out for the past ten years.
The bell rang, signaling it was time for lunch.
Time for my plan.
“Miss Gorka? I need to go to the bathroom.” She put on her most pained, can’t-wait-another-second expression.
Miss Gorka or another one of the grownups would always chaperone her and the other “special ones” whenever they had to leave the larger group of children—even for a bathroom break. But today a gaggle of children with questions about their homework pressed around Miss Gorka. She frowned and replied, “Be quick!”
Sophia nodded and shot into the hallway. This was her chance.
For days after the island trip ended, she’d had dreams. Dreams of her one day flying away to an island where she could walk the beaches and swim in the warm waters and be free to go anywhere at any time. Not like the Home, where field trips were rare and she hardly ever got a glimpse of the outside world. Television and radio were forbidden in the Home. She’d heard whispers on the playground about a magic screen that let you see and talk to anyone around the world, but she had no idea if it was real.
But maybe she could find out.
She recalled the three steps of the simple plan she’d formulated over the past week as she scooted down the empty hallway toward the back of the Home. Step one was getting away from the adult supervisors. Done!
Step two was unfolding right in front of her. She paused at the double doorway with the big bold letters that warned:
толькі для дарослых — Дзецям уваход забаронены
ADULTS ONLY — NO CHILDREN ALLOWED
She felt her pulse quicken. I could get beaten with The Stick for this! But she plunged forward into the restricted hallway.
She passed the first set of doors and winced at every echo her shoes made on the hard wooden floor. She approached the second set of doors and heard voices from inside. She peeked through the glass pane and saw three of the older instructors joking and smoking. She moved toward the final set of doors and entered the dingy room as quietly as she could. It was late August and most of the staff was still on break, so the room was empty.
It was just as the boy said.
Three days ago she’d overheard one of the boys on the playground bragging about how he was able to duck out and wander the streets of Minsk whenever he pleased. She said he was fibbing.
“I’m not a liar, and I can prove it!” the boy had said.
“How?”
“I’ll bring you back something. Name something I couldn’t get in the Home.”
She thought for a moment. Her mind settled on the treat she’d once had that sounded like her last name, Navitski.
“Bring me back a nalistniki. I’ll take mine with jam. Or chocolate!” She had tasted a nalistniki , a kind of rolled-up fried pancake with different stuffings, during a holiday street fair her class was permitted to attend. The Home never served them.
“That’s easy,” the boy said. “What do I get out of it?”
“If you tell me how you sneak out—you get a kiss!”
“Deal!”
At recess the next day, the boy disappeared, then reappeared just before the break ended—with her nalistniki. Sophia savored every bite and shared some with the boy. When she was done, she kissed him—her first kiss—and it was soft and exciting and tasted like forbidden candy.
The boy lived up to his end of the deal. He told her about the staff entryway and the small opening where you could wriggle through the bottom of the chain link fence.
As she continued with her plan, she found the staff entrance on the far side of the room that the boy told her about. The door was big and old and made of heavy wood, and it took all her strength for her small fingers to turn the knob and for her shoulder to nudge it open just enough for her body to scoot through.
She found herself alone in the back of the building. Time for step three.
She needed to get past the fence that ran up and down the back of the Home. There was a metal door in the middle, and she tried it but it was locked, just as the boy said. Her eyes scanned the length of the hedges until she spotted it, a small brown clump of dead hedges that camouflaged the secret opening.
She plunked down on her butt, scraped against the harsh bristles of the dead brambles that guarded the jagged hole in the rusty fence, and pulled herself through, inch by inch, finally emerging through a tangle of greenery on the other side.
She brushed away the leaves on her behind and saw that she’d scraped her legs and gotten grass stains on her dress, but she didn’t care .
She’d made it. She was free!
She looked up and down the sidewalk and then danced and ran as fast as she could, ready to explore this outside world she had dreamed about for so long that was right beneath her feet.
40
Dallas, August 28
“ W e’ll be out of your hair in a minute,” Sharon Sullivan assured Mackenzie Taylor, her surrogate all-star, as they wrapped up a morning of shooting at Mackenzie’s house in the Dallas burbs.
Mackenzie was the total package: a young military wife, a stay-at-home mom with two toddlers, a college graduate, a volunteer at a local food bank, and a part-time online editor at a lifestyle publication. She had quickly become pregnant during her first IVF cycle, solidifying the two-time mom’s nickname as the Easy-Bake Oven of Arlington, Texas.
“That’s quite all right,” Mackenzie said in her darling drawl. “Do you folks want some more iced tea?”
Sullivan, her field producer, and the photographer-videographer all declined.
“I know you’re not showing yet,” producer Gabrielle said. “But we’d like to visually document the progress week by week.”
“Sure, no problem at all.” Mackenzie whipped off her T-shirt to reveal a flat stomach and impeccable abs .
“Well, now I’m jealous.” Sullivan couldn’t help but smirk a little.
She wished she could clone Mackenzie Taylor. Well, not literally clone, she silently amended, remembering where she worked.
Sullivan and her crew had spent weeks creating “media kits” by filming surrogates in their homes. The kits were a series of slowly unfolding episodes in the style of a video diary, helping to tell the story of a surrogate’s pregnancy to give the clients a sense of reassurance that all was going well.
Quality surrogates were hard to find. Most were regular working-class moms who were doing it for a combination of altruism and money. Most didn’t have a college degree or even a career—Mackenzie had both. And even though there was no genetic tie between the surrogate and child, the focus groups conducted by Birthrights Unlimited detected a vague unease—an unspoken class bias. Clients didn’t want their precious little ones being carried by someone at the lower end of the social spectrum, though they would never phrase it so indelicately.
That class friction was the impetus for Birthrights Unlimited’s “double blind rule” for all surrogacies.
Sulli
van and the company’s Chief Surrogacy Officer crafted the plan together. The clients—that is, the biological parents—didn’t get to know who their surrogate was, apart from the weekly video and photo updates that Sullivan’s team sent out. The surrogate didn’t have to put up with the anxieties of overwrought, tightly wound parents-to-be. And neither side had to deal with society’s deep-seated revulsion against attaching a dollar figure to the creation of a human life. That was the beauty of the double blind rule. The subtext of the arrangement could stay hidden and out of plain view.
“Okay, smile!” the photographer said.
She began taking photos of Mackenzie’s pregnant tummy from several different angles to document week three. It would be a regular weekly intrusion for these select preggie ladies from here until the due date, Sullivan knew, but the inconvenience was offset by the $10,000 each of these women would receive for participating in these Pregnancy Updates. An hour ago they recorded Mackenzie’s weekly video message, making sure not to mention any parents-to-be by name. It was likely they’d be able to use Mackenzie’s video updates for years to come.
Unethical? Perhaps. At Birthrights Unlimited, situational ethics were all about the elasticity.
“Do you use your workout equipment?” Gabrielle the producer asked.
“Sure do,” Mackenzie said as her two rugrats tugged at her nylon gym pants.
“Okay, a couple of final shots of you on the treadmill. Then we’re out of here.”