“Who is it?”
“Just the most wanted man in the world. Nolan Ragsdale.”
Hazel’s heart beat faster than before—to an unhealthy level, she was sure. She couldn’t help but wonder if Esroy had gotten her message and called the authorities. He would have been able to send her coordinates at the time, but she didn’t know when Gus had smashed her watch or if Esroy even felt concerned enough to call the authorities.
She watched Gus leave the room, probably to get Nolan Ragsdale. The very thought sent her head spinning. First, what did an assassin want with her? Second, what was Ragsdale doing in Mainland anyway? The president’s assassination was a year ago and the reports had been that Ragsdale had sought asylum somewhere in the Outland. If he was here, then he was surely planning something big and terrible. The thought sickened her. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to be sucked into his plan. She would die before she helped him with any plan he might have, which brought on a new terror that tonight would possibly be her last.
She could feel her limbs start to shake as she waited. He would want her to do something, probably because of her clearance level within military operations. She would refuse and he would slit her throat. That would be it. He would then move on to a different person or a different plan. Hazel would become a forgotten tiny part of a giant scheme to overthrow the Mainland government.
Part of her felt empowered by the thought. She felt a boldness welling up within her—almost as if she was ready to stand up to the Outland monster. Her limbs shook less. She might join her mom and sister in the afterlife, but at least she would do so with dignity and pride.
When two men appeared in the doorway, however, that feeling of boldness quickly fled her and the shaking came back. Gus stood behind Ragsdale as he moved toward Hazel. Ragsdale pulled out a knife from his belt and held it out.
What, was he going to torture her before she even had the chance to refuse to help him? Her jaws clenched and she shut her eyes tightly, wondering where the first slice or jab would land.
“I’m sorry for the rope,” Ragsdale said.
Hazel felt her hands fall to her sides as the rope was cut free from her wrists. Her eyes opened slowly and she found Ragsdale sitting in front of her, his knife put away at his belt.
“We thought it was necessary since we didn’t know how you would act when you woke up.”
Hazel didn’t respond. She couldn’t. The man in front of her looked a lot different than he did on the news. He looked younger, though his hair was still messy and he had several days of growth on his face. He looked tired more than anything—far from the handsome man that used to look pristine and put together for his position under the former president.
“I’m just going to say it,” he said. “The Outland needs your help.”
“The Outland can burn in the hell it is.”
“I thought you would say something like that. And I know it’s out of simple ignorance that you would think that way.”
“It’s not ignorance that I was kidnapped and strapped to a chair in some abandoned building.”
“Tell me, Hazel, if I had called you and asked to set up a meeting with you, would you have come?”
Hazel didn’t answer.
“Of course not. You would have called the authorities like any good citizen of Mainland would.”
“So you kidnapped me and tied me to a chair.”
“You aren’t tied to the chair anymore,” Ragsdale said. He motioned toward the other side of the room. “There is a door right there. It takes you to a hallway that leads you to the outside of this building. You’re less than a mile away from your work and you can be there in a few minutes.”
“You won’t stop me from leaving right now?”
He shook his head. “I would rather you hear what I have to say, but I’m not evil. I’m not going to stop you from leaving and I’m certainly not going to hurt you.”
She looked from Ragsdale to Gus who was still standing in the other doorway. She then slowly got out of her chair and started walking toward the other door.
“You won’t hear what I have to say?”
“I don’t need to hear anything an assassin has to say. Especially one from the Outland.”
She was a foot from the door. She wondered when he would come after her, exposing his words as a lie. She reached out, her fingers now touching the cold metal of the doorknob.
“I had access to a lot of secret information,” he said. “That’s why I killed him in the first place.”
She twisted the doorknob and pulled the door open. He hadn’t lied about the hallway. It was dark and scary looking, but at the other end was a door—her way back into the streets.
“I need your help to obtain that information,” he said to her.
She took a step toward the hallway, holding the door open with her left hand.
“What if I told you the government was hiding a nuclear weapon underground in the middle of the city? And what if I told you they very well may use it?”
His words made her insides go cold. He’s lying, she thought to herself. There’s no way that’s true. She didn’t look back as she took her first step into the hallway.
Just before the door closed behind her, he spoke again. “Why would I go through the trouble of getting you here if what I’m saying isn’t true?”
The door closed heavily behind her. Each step she took toward the door at the end of the hallway felt surreal. She hadn’t expected to be allowed to leave. She thought they were going to kill her—a possibility that hadn’t completely vanished. Finally she got to the door. Before she opened it, she wondered if it really led to the outside world or if she would just find a wall behind it, blocking her escape. She reached for the knob, twisted, and opened. The cool night air rushed past her and flickering streetlights shined onto her face. All she had to do was make a run for it and she could escape. She could get to the authorities and tell them what happened. Sure, Ragsdale and Gus would be gone by the time she got the information out, but her part in this would be done.
But something kept her from going outside. Why would he let her leave like this if he wasn’t telling the truth? Or was this just some mind game to make her come back to him by her own decision, compelling her to think that it was she who wanted to be in that room. But if what he said was true, then the situation was serious. Nuclear weapons were what put the world in the shape it was in today. Mainland was the only small vestige of civilization left. No one knew of any other. They survived on the technology given to them by previous generations, and no matter how advanced it seemed, they were still isolated in this world. The fallout from the old nuclear blasts kept them from exploring the globe. It was impossible to look for survivors somewhere else. Regaining the ability for satellite technology was almost pointless with the limited amount of fuel they had. The fuel powered the city. It powered construction sites. Even a hundred or more years since the Great War they were limited to the technology on the ground.
The past hundred years, since the Great War, was filled with promises of never allowing weapons of mass destruction to be produced ever again. Doing so would surely make the human race go extinct. And the people praised the politicians for it. They adored the policy of never being allowed to build such a horrific weapon again.
This is what gnawed at her. She wanted to run away but she wanted to hear what Ragsdale had to say if it was true, because if he wasn’t lying, things were about to get bad. But what did Ragsdale have to do with it? Did he want the bomb for himself? Did he want to disable it? Did he even know it actually existed?
It went against her better judgment, but she let the door close in front of her. She stared at it for a minute, wondering if she was crazy or if the drugs Gus had given her were screwing with her mind. She turned and walked back down the hallway. Her fear had been replaced by curiosity. If Nolan Ragsdale had been playing mind games, then he’d won, and she was handing him the trophy. Though, she didn’t exactly plan on
helping him. She would tell the authorities all about this encounter. If they caught him he would go to jail. They would execute him.
She opened the door to the dark room to find Gus still in the other doorway and Ragsdale still sitting across from the chair that had been Hazel’s.
He looked up at her and offered a one-sided grin. “I promise this will only take a few minutes of your time.”
16
It was just Hazel and Nolan in the room. Gus had left in the middle of a coughing fit, probably having heard Nolan’s talk before. Nolan seemed anxious, his hands folded together and between his knees. He occasionally rocked back and forth, a cold sweat forming on his brow.
“I thought I was the one that was supposed to be nervous in this situation,” Hazel said, though there was no lack of nervousness within her. She still didn’t feel right about being in this room willingly. Everything in her told her to run and never look back, but Nolan had her where he wanted her, and she felt compelled to stay if even for a minute or two.
“I think I should start by telling you why I murdered the president in the first place,” he said.
Hazel swallowed and stared at him in the eyes, offering no go ahead or nod of any kind. She was a stone and it was up to him to do the talking.
His eyes shifted from side to side and he took a deep breath. “I won’t get into how I got caught up with the Outlander cause, but I will tell you that for me it started in a meeting like this one.”
The stone broke. “You were stalked and kidnapped?” she snapped.
“Actually, yes.”
She hadn’t expected his answer.
“Like you I was never harmed in any way. Just offered the chance to hear the truth.”
“And what is the truth?”
“That Mainlanders are selfish and they’re sending an entire generation of people to their grave.”
“Who, the Outlanders?”
“Yes.”
“You take care of yourselves just fine,” she said.
“You have no idea.” His hands unclasped and he no longer rocked. He sat straight, a stern look on his face as he stared Hazel in the eyes. “We are scavengers because we have to be. We rob tankers and attack the Mainland because we have no alternatives. Do you know how many Outlanders there are?”
“Thousands.”
“Tens of thousands,” Nolan snapped. “That’s tens of thousands of people that are in danger of starvation. We’ve estimated that we’ll run out of food and supplies within a year. When that time comes we’ll all be dead.”
Hazel resisted the temptation to say ‘good’ because she thought he might flare up at her. She wasn’t here to get at him.
“I know your history. I know what happened to you. It’s a shame that it did, too, because I want you to know that we aren’t all like that. We aren’t savages as your government would have you believe.”
“Have you seen yourselves? You paint yourselves red. You dress like savages. You eat like savages. You kill like savages.”
“When we fight, we aim to intimidate. We are a different kind of people with different ideas and views on life, yes. But we don’t kill on a whim. We don’t attack needlessly. We don’t go after the innocent.”
“Tell that to my family.”
Nolan took a deep breath and looked away toward the door. “You want to know the murder statistics the last year I was part of the government here in Mainland?” He waited for Hazel to respond, but she said nothing. “632,” he said.
“Is that 632 with or without President Godfrey’s assassination?”
Nolan’s eyelids narrowed at her. Perhaps she had gone too far. She felt herself stiffen again as her previous nervousness started to creep into her bones, but his next words calmed them.
“That includes the president,” he answered. “My point is that there is no such murder rate among the Outlanders. We paint ourselves for war to intimidate our enemies. It has served us well in battle before. We fight so we can get supplies. We fight so we can live. If we didn’t fight we would have already starved.”
“Why don’t you create your own city?”
“We have our own city, but Mainland is taking all the resources. We can’t power our city. We can’t dig wells deep enough to maintain a constant water supply. We can’t build greenhouses. All we have going for us is our proximity to the oil fields but even then, Mainland has staked its claim on that as well. We’ve tried to live as our own society for as long as we can, but our time is up. We either have to join the Mainlanders or die like the rest of the world.”
Hazel didn’t like the silence that followed his statement. She felt like she was supposed to say something next—as if she was supposed to say ‘okay, what can I do?’
“So,” Hazel said, “you don’t want to destroy Mainland or bring it to its knees or anything like that? You just want to join?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m having a hard time figuring out what I have to do with that.”
“The reason I killed the president was because he was about to enact an all-out war against the Outlanders once and for all. I had learned about the nuclear weapon and I knew it could be used against the Outlanders.”
“Wouldn’t that have caused backlash for the president?” Hazel asked.
“Of course. Which is why he put a new plan into motion.” He nodded at her. “Your robots.”
Hazel shifted in her seat.
“Killing him only stalled the program, however,” Nolan said. “In reality I should have gone after Vice President Morris too, but I had to make a choice.”
“And Morris knows of the bomb too?”
“Of course. But I think the robots pose a bigger threat because he can use them without repercussion. Don’t get me wrong, if things got bad enough he would detonate the bomb without consent. Then he would tout that the enemy was eliminated forever and that it was the last bomb ever made. He might even be chastised by the public, but he would still go down in history as the man who brought peace to Mainland and destroyed the only remaining enemy.”
“Fallout,” Hazel said.
“What?”
“He wouldn’t detonate a bomb so close to our city. The Outlanders are too close to us. He wouldn’t risk the nuclear fallout.”
He held up a finger. “Only the wind never comes in from the Outlander’s direction. The fallout would be blown away from the city—a very limited risk considering our location. Mainland would never feel the effects of it.”
“Okay, so you managed to delay the robots. What then?”
“I didn’t have a plan yet, though we all knew at the time that we would have to unite with Mainland at some point. That or find another source of energy and a way to make food and get water. We knew that was a few years away.”
“And now the time has come.”
Ragsdale shrugged. “Your robotics program is in full swing again. In fact, I’m afraid we’re too late.”
Hazel shook her head. “Even if I was able to believe a single shred of anything you just told me, what in the world do you think I could do? I’m just some programmer.”
“Not just some programmer,” Nolan said, smiling widely. “You are the programmer. You created the most sophisticated artificial intelligence the world has ever seen, before or after the Great War. So sophisticated that scientists hesitated to even call it artificial intelligence—they say that you created life. A consciousness. I personally think it’s just a nice set of calculated numbers, but I also don’t know anything about programming.”
“Technically you are just a nice set of calculated numbers, but we don’t exactly teach that in school.”
“I tend to believe we are more than that. And your program might be too.”
“You still haven’t told me why you need me.”
“I need you to stop the robotics program before it takes off. The Outlanders won’t survive it.”
“You have given me nothing to make me want to help you,” she said.
/> “Also, I need you to help me get into the military mainframe computer.”
Hazel almost laughed before she realized he was serious. “I don’t…” she shook her head. “First of all, I don’t know much about that. Second…”
“Esroy,” he interrupted. “Your famous first project. It is a thinking program, right?”
“Of course he is.”
“Then he can get to the files I need.”
“Files?”
“I have proof of everything I’m telling you. Audio recordings. Video recordings. Written messages. There is a video file with President Godfrey explicitly talking to President Morris about his plans to use the robots to destroy the Outlanders—the backup plan being the nuke. Morris was on board with the idea.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Nolan shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s there. And I think Esroy can help us get it.”
“How? I don’t even give him access to the network.”
“Give it to him. He’s a supercomputer.”
“You really think he could just hack in and get what you want?”
“He can get us far enough, but he will need my help.”
“Why?”
“Because the way into the mainframe, the files that are locked away, requires a retinal scan. That means I need to be with Esroy when he gets to that point.”
“He’s artificial intelligence, not a hacker. Besides, how do you expect to get into the military compound without being caught?”
“We have friends in a lot of places,” Nolan said.
She didn’t know what he meant by that, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“You are our link to getting those files, and stopping the robotics program.”
“And then what? What will you do with the files?”
“What comes after that doesn’t matter until we get it,” Nolan said. “All I can worry about right now is phase one: getting the information.”
“And your entire operation hinges on me?”
Prototype D (Prototype D Series Book 1) Page 13