by Kyle Mills
“I’m still wrapping my mind around that — too much time playing Vampire Armageddon. The basic apps — things like weather and phone and GPS — seem pretty much flawless and the color-coding is incredibly intuitive. My hair dryer burned out yesterday and I was as the store staring at a huge shelf of them when I realized I could just use the Merge. I turned on LayerCake and a couple of seconds later picked the one with the darkest green glow.”
“But what about the evaluation of people that everyone’s talking about?”
“I’m reserving judgment at this point, but I have to admit that I think it’s going to work better than the press is giving it credit for. It’s been pretty accurate when I’ve looked at people I know well and I have to assume that it’s just as good for people I don’t know. And it’s only going to get better as it collects more data and collates user feedback,” Janine said.
The gate swung back and Smith pulled into what the sign said was the Anacostia Seagoing Yacht Club. The pleasantly winding asphalt and carefully landscaped berms reinforced that particular piece of fiction, but in fact had been designed to make a straight-on attack impossible. Smith winced as the Triumph scraped over a speed bump and then turned to parallel a dock full of boats that completed the illusion that this was just an extremely exclusive playground for wealthy yacht owners.
“It’s a brave new world,” the interviewer said, and Smith switched off the radio.
It sure as hell was.
9
Khost Province
Afghanistan
Randi put the helicopter into a steep climb, feeling a jolt of adrenaline when she spotted the shape of a goatherd moving against the dead Afghan landscape. It wasn’t the fear of death that caused it, though. It was the fear that something might happen to the chopper.
There were only three in existence and the CIA tended not to hand them out to self-confessed mediocre pilots. The change of heart could only be the result of the quiet involvement of Fred Klein, but still it had been made clear that there would be hell to pay if she brought it back with so much as a scratch.
Neither the animals nor the goatherd so much as glanced at the sky as she passed overhead, reminding her why she’d fallen in love the moment she’d laid eyes on the aircraft. Its blades had a bizarre bat-wing shape that cut rotor slap by more than half; what noise was left was deadened by a web of speakers using the same technology as over-the-counter noise-canceling headphones. The skids and bottom were painted the hazy blue of the Afghan sky and the top the monotonous tan of the Afghan ground, completing the incredibly effective stealth package.
Of course there were drawbacks. The range was crap and it was a single-seater with a 250-pound capacity. So instead of carrying Deuce to watch her back, she was crammed into the cockpit with a bunch of jerry cans full of fuel. At least they’d make a really big fire if she crashed. Burning alive would be preferable to having to go back to Klein and tell him that she’d left the CIA’s multimillion-dollar toy sticking out of a sand dune.
Randi followed an obvious ridgeline, navigating by memory toward the Taliban village of Kot’eh. She was fairly certain they were responsible for the attack on Sarabat and while it didn’t seem to bother anyone else, she couldn’t shake the image of those headless bodies. She wanted to know what the hell had happened there and, while his motivations were murkier, so did Fred Klein.
It wasn’t until she came around the edge of a broad plateau that the smoke became visible — multiple narrow columns rising dead straight for a hundred meters before being ripped apart by the crosswinds she’d been fighting since leaving base.
“Damn,” she said, her voice just audible over the hum of the engine and hiss of the state-of-the-art rotors. A tug on the collective took her to maximum altitude — a pathetic two hundred meters off the deck.
In the end, neither the mundane performance specs, the fancy paint job, nor the silence mattered at all. A few passes made it clear that there was nothing left alive in Kot’eh to care about her presence. And while she couldn’t say she hadn’t considered the possibility that this was what she’d find, the knot in her stomach tightened perceptibly.
She made another arcing pass around the north edge of the village, speaking aloud to herself again. “So what’s the brilliant plan now, Randi?”
She answered the question by dipping the chopper’s nose toward the rooftops. Just a quick peek. What could possibly go wrong?
It was strange to hear only the sound of the sand battering the glass as she touched down. There was no visible movement outside. She jumped out, leaning over her assault rifle as she ran through the dissipating cloud of dust.
When she made it to clear air, she stood upright and scanned the scene through her scope. To the untrained eye, it would be déjà vu all over again. Just another burning Afghan village strewn with bodies — no different than Sarabat, except that the men were still wearing their heads.
Her eye was far from untrained, though, and it immediately identified stark contrasts. The weapons used against Kot’eh had been far more powerful and destructive than the ubiquitous AK-47. There were gaping wounds in a number of the bodies that were undoubtedly caused by fifty-caliber sniper rounds, buildings displaying RPG damage, and three craters large and well placed enough that they suggested sophisticated light artillery.
The footprints of the offensive force ran the gamut from American and European military-issue boots to sole patterns she didn’t recognize — probably commercially available models favored by mercenaries. Even more interesting was that, if followed backward, most just suddenly appeared with two extraordinarily deep impressions. They’d been dropped, almost certainly at night, and then fanned out in an intricate pattern that suggested serious operators.
Again in contrast with Sarabat, the men in this village had fought. There was no question of that, just as there was no question that their efforts had been completely futile. She counted only three places where bloodstains didn’t have a corresponding corpse — attackers that had been wounded and evacuated.
The sun dipped onto the western plateau as she continued her search, finally finding what she was looking for near a charred fence: the body of Farhad Wahidi. They’d had a very tentative relationship, created over a number of years during occasional moments when the interests of the Taliban and CIA converged. She couldn’t say that she was sorry to see the fundamentalist son of a bitch dead, but it did make a productive conversation unlikely.
She pushed her sunglasses onto her headscarf and continued to search, staring at the ground as she traced ever-larger concentric circles through the scattered buildings. Occasionally, she’d stumble upon the long-strided tracks of a running Afghan headed toward the edge of the village, and she followed each one to an end that quickly began to feel inevitable: a body with a single, nicely centered round between the shoulder blades.
The light continued to flatten and obscure details that the wind would probably make permanent work of overnight. She was about to give up when she found one last set of footprints coming out of a corral full of blackened livestock. They were awkward at first, suggesting that their author had run crouched, using the panicked animals as cover. After about fifty meters, the stride lengthened and turned east toward boulder-strewn mountains glowing red in the distance.
Three pursuing tracks soon converged, but their configuration was calculated and their pace unhurried. This wasn’t a chase initiated in the heat of battle. No, they’d found the track just as she had and were now hunting the escapee like an animal.
Randi looked back at the rising moon. She knew from experience that it would provide plenty of light to track the men and that, in all likelihood, the one person who had the answers she was looking for wouldn’t live to see morning. If he wasn’t dead already.
Of course, setting out on a nighttime chase meant leaving the chopper. The very thought conjured another surge of adrenaline and the mental image of returning to find it stripped and up on blocks.
“Ba
d idea,” she said, pulling out her sat phone and dialing a number from memory.
A powerful encryption routine delayed the connection for a moment but then Fred Klein’s familiar voice came on.
“Did you find anything?”
“Your suspicious mercenary activity. Everyone here is dead.”
“So those villagers wipe out Sarabat under suspicious circumstances and then they themselves are wiped out by an unknown mercenary group.”
“Seems to me that someone helped them take out Sarabat and now they’re covering their tracks. The question is why? Who would care this much about a couple of little villages in the middle of nowhere?”
10
Prince George’s County, Maryland
USA
Jon Smith moved deliberately down the hallway, knowing he was being watched from multiple angles. It had been decorated with tasteful rugs and vases full of fresh flowers, but it would take more than the scent of gardenias to make it feel like anything other than what it was: a deadly shooting gallery designed to deal with anyone who might want to penetrate to the inner offices uninvited.
A former special forces operative appeared at the far end and Smith put a hand up — partially in greeting and partially to prove that it was empty. A brief nod was all he got before the man once again faded into the meticulously polished woodwork.
The Covert-One that had been authorized by the president after the Hades virus disaster was in many ways gone now. At first, it hadn’t been anything more than a precarious and diffuse organization based entirely on trust — the president’s in his lifelong friend Fred Klein, and Klein’s in his loose collection of gifted operators around the world.
As it had proved its effectiveness, though, it had grown. Now C1 had a place to call home and even a modest budget — one quietly siphoned from other government agencies without the knowledge of the American people or Congress.
Its very existence was incredibly dangerous for everyone involved — particularly President Sam Adams Castilla. In truth, Smith had initially suspected that cold feet would prevail and the organization would quickly disappear. Unfortunately, the world was becoming increasingly dangerous, politics increasingly bizarre, and the established intel agencies increasingly bloated. The need for a small, nimble organization that could be deployed on a moment’s notice grew with every war, rogue nuclear program, and terrorist attack.
Smith entered an outer office dominated by a modular desk topped with five massive monitors. All he could see of the inestimable Maggie Templeton was a wisp of graying blond hair over the top of the one in the center.
He was about to say something when her hand rose and a finger pointed toward an open door in the back wall. He took the hint and headed toward it, tossing his jacket on a sofa that looked like it had never been sat on. Best not to talk to her when she was concentrating.
“So what’s going on, Fred?”
Klein stood from behind his far less elaborate desk and took Smith’s hand in a firm grip before indicating toward a chair across from him. In a way, he seemed frozen in time — the receding hairline had stabilized years ago and his eyes never lost their intensity behind wire-rimmed glasses. And while Smith couldn’t prove it, he was fairly certain the man was wearing the same suit as the first time they’d met.
“How was the presentation?”
“The what?”
“Las Vegas. The unveiling of the Merge.”
So there was the answer to the compelling question of how a purposely obscure army microbiologist had gotten an invitation to a function packed with tech industry billionaires and reporters. Between his relationship with the president and his history at the NSA and CIA, Klein could get just about anything done. He rarely exercised that ability, though, tending to err on the side of not risking exposure unless it was extremely important. Sending a man to graze on imported shrimp at the Las Vegas Convention Center didn’t seem to qualify.
“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it,” Smith said.
“So you were impressed? The president wanted the opinion of someone he trusts.”
Smith assumed that he meant in regard to the military or intel-gathering potential of the technology, but wasn’t entirely sure.
“The claims he made seemed pretty far-fetched, to be honest. But based on the reaction so far, it looks like he’s hit a home run with the hardware and LayerCake has a lot of potential — both good and bad. Right now there are only a handful of apps but once independent developers get hold of it, functionality is going to explode.”
“So you haven’t tried it yourself?”
Smith shook his head. “I haven’t been able to get within a block and a half of the DC store. I thought the lines would die down but according to the news, people are starting to camp out overnight.”
“Ah, right. Because it’s going to save the world.”
“That might be an overstatement.”
Klein reached for a pipe, turning it over in his hands before lighting it. “I have to admit that I’m skeptical. It seems like a smartphone with a more convenient interface. That is, if you define ‘convenience’ as letting someone drill into your skull.”
Smith grinned. “You’re not really the demographic he’s going for, Fred. The truth is that people have been happily using the implants with his hearing system for years. And while I’m with you that it’s not going to save the world, the Merge — and maybe even more so LayerCake — is going to change it pretty deeply.”
“I’m a little old to need a nanny, Jon. And if I did, I’m not sure I’d pick Dresner.” The smoke rolled from Klein’s mouth before being whisked away by the sophisticated ventilation system. Maggie had no tolerance for secondhand smoke.
“There’s no doubt that there are a lot of issues that need to be worked out but there’s no way to ignore LayerCake’s potential. Think about those speed limit signs that tell you how fast you’re going. That kind of immediate feedback has been incredibly successful in changing people’s behavior. Now consider a hypothetical app that uses brain wave analysis to tell you when you’ve had too much to drink and puts a little icon in your peripheral vision. That’s a powerful piece of data. And then expand that — create an environment where you know that the things you do will bear immediately on the way people see you. That’d make you think twice about your behavior, wouldn’t it?”
Klein scowled. “Dresner believes there’s a perfect angel in every one of us just dying to get out. I can tell you that isn’t my experience.”
“I admit it’s a little naive. But you could dedicate your life to worse things than trying to make the world a better place. I mean, it’s hard to overestimate his contributions, Fred. His work on the way the brain controls the immune system is on its way to wiping out autoimmune diseases. And his new class of antibiotics is making resistance an unpleasant piece of history instead of the looming disaster I guarantee you it was. Then there’s his impact on the hearing-impaired, the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s pumped into education, the—”
Klein put up a hand, silencing him. “Fine. I’ll concede he’s on the short list for the Nobel Prize for Medicine and if his apps can actually get our political and financial systems working again, I’ll give him the Peace Prize too. But in the meantime, I’m going to stay cynical and ask just what it is we really know about the man.”
“Personally? Not much,” Smith admitted. “From what I’ve read, his parents survived a concentration camp and ended up in East Germany. He grew up there and escaped when he was in his twenties.”
“That’s the public story.”
“There’s a private story?”
Klein nodded and took a drag on his pipe. “His father was a physicist and his mother was a medical doctor. Both were extremely talented and were put to good use by the Soviets, but then fell out of favor for some reason and ended up in prison. It appears that they were captured trying to escape to the West. Christian, who was six at the time, got sent to an orphanage. Then, a few y
ears later, his own talents were recognized and he was given the opportunity to earn PhDs in biology and neuroscience, which he did by the time he was eighteen. When he got out he went to work for the communists, but we’ve never been able to determine in what capacity — bioweapons would be a good guess. After a few years, he and a young psychologist named Gerhard Eichmann managed to jump the wall and Dresner went to work for a Munich company that did pharmaceutical research. He proved too unstable, though, and was fired after less than a year. That was 1973. A year later, he’d put together enough private capital to finance a start-up and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Okay,” Smith said. “But I still don’t understand your interest in all this and how I fit in. You didn’t call me to air Steve Jobs’s dirty laundry when the iPad came out.”
“The iPad doesn’t link directly to people’s brains and it doesn’t constantly gather information to create its own universe of good and evil. If this thing is as indispensable as everyone says, half the industrialized world is going to be hooked up to it within a few years. That gives a man we don’t know much about a hell of a lot of power.”
“Dresner isn’t twenty-four anymore, Fred. Was he unstable at the time? Why wouldn’t he be? It sounds like his parents were probably executed and by all reports, those East German orphanages weren’t all sunshine and candy canes.”
Klein just sat there and pulled on his pipe.
“Come on, Fred. You didn’t call me in here to tell me about Christian Dresner’s spotty work history. There’s more, isn’t there?”
“A bit.”
“You have me on the edge of my seat. How did the Merge get on Covert-One’s radar?”
“In fact, it’s not. You’re here today as a soldier.”
Smith’s brow furrowed. “Okay. You’ve got my attention.”