Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  “Getting people to hang themselves is always easier if they don’t know which direction the rope is coming from,” Everly added.

  “I see,” Sommer said, trying to sit on the anger that had started again toward a slow boil as soon as they entered Iraqi airspace. There was no proof, after all, that the Minister of Defense was actually involved in the alleged atrocities.

  At least, not yet.

  “Which car do you want, sir?” Spendlove asked, gesturing behind her at the eight identical black town cars, all of which featured the same tinted windows and heavy-riding look of armored vehicles.

  In reply, Everly produced an eight-sided die, held his tablet up and flat to the ground, and rolled the die onto it. It came up a three. “Third from the front,” he told her, putting the die away.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “With your permission, I’d like to ride with you. We can get a head start on the briefing that way.”

  Everly gestured. “Lead on.”

  A minute later the motorcade was driving down the wide road leading toward the city proper. “No official military escort?” Sommer asked.

  “Offered and declined,” Spendlove said. “There was no polite way of asking them to pick up escort after we left the hangar, and we certainly didn’t want the General’s men seeing which specific car you were riding in.”

  “Good call,” Everly said. “So what’s the current political and military situation?”

  “Well, sir,” Spendlove said, opening her tablet, “as of oh-seven-hundred today … ”

  General Faraaz al-Hirai was a tall, stocky man with a Saddam Hussein mustache and sharp, piercing dark eyes. The smile he flashed as he welcomed his visitors into his office, Sommer noted, didn’t make it past the mustache to his eyes. “I trust you had a pleasant flight?” he asked politely as he gestured Sommer and Everly to a pair of overstuffed, extremely comfortable chairs that had been set up across the half-acre of polished mahogany that served as his desk.

  “Pleasant enough,” Sommer said.

  “It was also long and tiring,” Everly added, pushing back his jacket sleeve and peering at his watch. “And my biological clock is still set on D.C. time, which is currently one in the morning. Can we skip the pleasantries and get on with it?”

  “Certainly,” al-Hirai said. The words and tone were civil enough, but his eyes frosted over a bit. “I appreciate a man who goes straight to business.” He looked back at Sommer. “As I understand it, Dr. Sommer, your people are accusing someone in my government of using Soulminder for torture.”

  “It’s more than just an accusation, General,” Sommer said. “We have proof that certain of your dissidents have died, returned to their bodies, then died again. Some of them multiple times.”

  “Things are not always as they seem, Doctor,” the general said equably. “As it happens, I have personally looked into this situation. The truth is that the enemies of our nation that you refer to have deliberately engineered these incidents.”

  “The prisoners have engineered their own deaths?”

  “Indeed,” the general said. “Their goal, of course, being to discredit the government.”

  “I wasn’t so much concerned with the goal as I was the mechanics,” Sommer said. “How exactly did they pull off multiple suicides while in your custody?”

  The general scowled. “Poison, of course,” he said. “Small packets hidden in various parts of their body. One of the prisoners actually swallowed several packets before being taken into custody, each nestled in a slow-dissolve casing so that one death would follow another in succession a few hours apart.” He gestured to the computer on his desk. “I have all the relevant records and documents.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Sommer said. He’d expected al-Hirai to push back against the charges, but he’d assumed the stonewalling would take the traditional form of blaming someone else in the regime, either some flunky lower down the chain of command or someone in an entirely different ministry. Trying to invoke a prisoner conspiracy at least bought him points for originality. “And the purpose of this supposed discrediting? I assume they didn’t think such actions per se would alter your government’s stance on whatever issue they disagree with you on.”

  “The actions of so few would certainly not have any such effect,” al-Hirai said grimly. “But if they can persuade you that these deaths are our doing, they may persuade you to shut down our Soulminder facilities.” He smiled faintly. “There is an obscure but relevant proverb about a flea destroying a village by biting an elephant. If they can spread unrest from the small fringe to the middle and upper classes, they believe they can create a popular uprising against us.”

  And then, as if to punctuate his accusation, the office’s side wall blew in.

  Sommer found himself kneeling on the floor beside his chair without any memory of how he’d gotten there. Blinking through the swirling dust, he saw the indistinct form of a young man stride in through the ragged hole. “Dr. Sommer?” he called through the ringing in Sommer’s ears. “Dr. Sommer?”

  From the general’s side of the desk came a sharp, snarly-sounding Arabic word, the sound of a man who was angry, startled, frightened, or all three.

  Small wonder. As the young man continued to approach through the floating debris Sommer saw that he was not only hefting a large handgun but also wore a dynamite-laden vest. In his left hand was a small cylinder, wired to the vest, almost certainly a dead-man detonator. “Dr. Sommer?” he called again.

  With only four of them in the room, including the gunman himself, there didn’t seem much point in playing dumb. “I’m Dr. Sommer,” Sommer identified himself, standing up. An odd calmness had followed the initial shock of the explosion, and he was mildly surprised to discover his knees weren’t even shaking. “What can I do for you?”

  The young man took another three steps toward Sommer before stopping. His expression, Sommer could see now, was a mix of pain, desperation, and hope. “I ask for my brother,” he said, clearly struggling with the English words. “Please. You must help him.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” Sommer assured him. Peripherally, he saw that Everly was in a crouch beside his own chair, his own gun ready in his hand. “Is he sick? Is he dying?”

  “You don’t understand,” the man said, a bitter weariness in his voice. “He is already dead. Please; just let him die.”

  Sommer frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “He is already dead.” The man turned his head to glare at al-Hirai. “But he is forcing him to stay alive.”

  Sommer blinked … and only then realized that the assailant’s gun wasn’t pointed at him. It was, instead, pointed at al-Hirai. Frowning, he looked across the desk.

  The general was crouched behind the debris-covered mahogany, only his face and the gun in his hand visible above the dark wood. His eyes were burning murder toward the young man. “General?” Sommer invited.

  “What do you wish me to say?” al-Hirai spat. “He lies, of course.”

  “Do I?” the young man retorted. “My brother is in Soulminder even now. Tell them his name and let them ask him. Let them know the truth.”

  “The truth?” The general snarled something that was probably a curse. “Why would anyone expect truth from a terrorist?”

  “I am not a terrorist.” The young man looked back at Sommer. “Do you know how I am here, within the walls of his inner sanctum? I am here because he”—he jabbed a finger at al-Hirai—“ordered me to kill you. He was afraid you would—”

  “You lie!”

  “He ordered me to kill you,” the young man continued doggedly, “because he was afraid you would learn the truth.”

  “The truth about your brother?” Sommer asked.

  “Do not listen to this madman!” al-Hirai ordered. His gun hand was shaking with anger, but with the dynamite and dead-man switch there was nothing he could do
. “He is a traitor to his own people. He will die like the dog he is—”

  “Shut up, General,” Everly interrupted.

  The general sputtered. “You dare—?”

  “Shut up or I’ll shoot you where you stand.” Everly gestured to the young man. “You have more to say? Then say it.”

  The young man took a careful breath. “His newest form of torture,” he said, his voice shaking now. “He no longer kills a prisoner he wishes to torture, then heals his body and sends him back to die again. You at Soulminder can see that. Have seen that. So now he kills a prisoner—” His throat worked. “And then moves him into the body of his son. Or his wife, or his brother.

  “And then kills them.”

  Sommer stared at him, his stomach twisting. It was horrifying. It was utterly insane.

  And as he looked at al-Hirai, he knew it was also true.

  And the general knew that he knew. Baring his teeth in a snarl, the look of a man who no longer has anything to lose, he half rose from behind his desk and raised his gun to fire—

  His mouth snapping open in an unheard scream as Everly’s shot shattered his hand and sent the pistol flying.

  “Okay, Doc, time to go,” Everly said darkly, standing fully upright and gesturing to Sommer. “Now.”

  Sommer blinked at him. “But how do we—?”

  “Colonel Spendlove’s got the guard force pinned, but she won’t be able to hold off the reinforcements that are probably on the way,” Everly said. “We go now, or we don’t go at all.”

  “No!” the young man snarled. “You cannot leave. Not without helping my brother.”

  “We’ll do what we can for him,” Everly said. “You’ve got my word on that. But there’s nothing we can do from here.”

  “But you don’t understand,” the man pleaded. “If you leave, then he”—he jabbed a finger at al-Hirai—“will win. He will continue to kill.” His lips curled back in a snarl. “No—you will not leave. You will help my brother or—”

  “Or what?” Everly countered. “You’ll kill us? That would be a fine and noble tribute to your brother, wouldn’t it? Come on, Doc.”

  Carefully, Sommer eased around his chair and backed toward the door. The young man kept his eyes on him the whole way. Sommer reached the door and paused as Everly slipped past the young man and joined him. “I’m sorry,” he said as Everly cracked the door and peered out. “We’ll do what we can. I promise.”

  The young man hissed out a curse, his eyes blazing with fury and hopelessness. “I cannot stop you,” he said bitterly. He jabbed at Sommer with the dead-man trigger. “But someday I pray that you, too, will long for death, and yet be unable to grasp it.”

  Spendlove was waiting in the General’s reception room. “You all right?” she asked, her eyes flicking between the two of them.

  “We’re fine,” Everly assured her. “What’s it look like downstairs?”

  “We’re in control, but we won’t be for long,” she told him as they headed out the door and down the corridor. She stepped casually over a couple of twitching bodies; wincing, Sommer did the same. “Nice call, by the way. What tipped you off?”

  “The chairs,” Everly said. “I spotted a lot of other chairs on the way in, but these two were deliberately designed to be restrictive. There’s usually only one reason you want to make it hard for a bodyguard to draw.”

  Two minutes later, they emerged into the morning sunlight to find their eight cars had been formed into a semicircle with Spendlove’s group of security men and women crouched behind them in defensive positions, sending rhythmic suppression fire across the compound. “At last check the road to the airport was clear,” Spendlove said as she ushered Sommer into the nearest of the cars. “But that could change in a heartbeat.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll stay clear,” Everly assured her grimly. “How long until they can prep the plane?”

  “It’ll be ready by the time we get there,” Spendlove said. “I ordered a crash prep, and told the captain that if he couldn’t get it done in time I’d do it for him.”

  Bullets were starting to ricochet off the car’s hood and polycrystalline ceramic windows by the time the convoy headed out. “Exactly how many people do we have on the ground?” Sommer asked, peering out the window, wincing at each deflected shot. With Spendlove’s force in the cars and no longer pinning them down, the general’s soldiers were starting to emerge from their cover and were opening up with some serious fire of their own.

  “Enough,” Everly assured him, pulling out his phone. “Spendlove, you have the President’s private number?”

  “Sure.” She rattled it off. “You sure you don’t want the Prime Minister instead?”

  “Thanks—I’ve already got his,” Everly said, punching in the number. “Plus the Speaker of the Council. Conference calls are such fun.”

  They’d made it nearly to the compound gate, and the gunfire was becoming a hailstorm, by the time Everly got his multiple connections set up. “Gentlemen, this is Frank Everly, chief of Soulminder security,” he identified himself. “Let me cut straight to the chase. We have strong evidence that General Faraaz al-Hirai has been abusing your Soulminder facility for purposes of torture and political manipulation. We’ll be launching a deeper investigation, the results of which we’ll be discussing with you in the near future. Right now, I need you all to understand that we are leaving Baghdad, and that our convoy is not to be interfered with.”

  There was a pause as one of the others on the conversation apparently made a comment. “We’ll be presenting all the evidence in due course,” Everly said. “As I said, right now we simply require your assurance that we’ll be allowed to leave Iraq without further confrontation. To that end—”

  He broke off again, listening, a granite-set expression on his face. “To that end, Minister,” he continued quietly, “I have instructed Soulminder Baghdad to immediately lock down its facilities and cease all operations. That includes a suspension of any and all transfers and the turning off of any traps that aren’t already occupied. I trust I don’t need to spell out the implications?”

  A shiver ran up Sommer’s back. No, the Iraqi government wouldn’t need the implications spelled out. The first of Everly’s moves would largely be a matter of inconvenience, as people waiting to be moved from their traps back into their freshly healed bodies would be forced to wait.

  But the second was literally a threat of death. With all unoccupied traps locked out of the system, a Soulminder client who died would not be captured, but would instead be instantly and permanently dead.

  It was a terrible and terrifying threat, one that could potentially topple a government whose rich and powerful had become accustomed to the Soulminder safety net. And the men on the other end of Everly’s call knew it. They knew it all too well.

  The convoy had left the compound, and the gunfire had shifted to targeting the trunks and rear windows, when that gunfire abruptly ceased.

  “Thank you,” Everly said politely. Some men, Sommer knew, would allow themselves a moment to gloat. Everly wasn’t one of them. “Once we’re outside Iraqi airspace I’ll instruct the office to resume operations.” He paused. “And be very certain that we will be discussing General al-Hirai’s activities with you. Very soon.”

  “For the record, this is to be considered a courtesy briefing,” Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Lowell Marlin said briskly as he set his attaché case on the edge of Sommer’s desk and flipped it open. “It’s not in any way to be considered an official, on-the-record communication. I trust that’s understood?”

  “It is,” Sommer said, suppressing a sigh. He’d been through this same routine countless times, with countless governmental officials.

  Still, it was a necessary evil. Through Soulminder’s entire existence Jessica Sands had fought to keep the corporation and equipment from being nibb
led, co-opted, or otherwise attached by any governmental agency. Making sure that all government conversations were strictly off-the-record was part of her strategy for making sure the camel’s nose never got under the tent flap.

  Especially since that nose seemed to be permanently pressed up against the canvas. Sommer had lost track of the number of ways various agencies had tried to worm their way into Soulminder’s inner circle, from attempted regulation—with inspectors to “examine” the top-secret equipment—to licensing requirements, offers of quid pro quo tax breaks, and even threats of eminent domain.

  Each time Sands and Soulminder’s platoon of attorneys had successfully defeated the attempts. But that didn’t mean the politicians wouldn’t keep trying. Far from it. They had access to a nearly unlimited assemblage of lawyers, whose working hours were billed to the taxpayers and who could therefore theoretically never be outspent. Soulminder was both a powerful carrot and an intimidating stick, and Sommer had no doubt that there would be attempts to take it over as long as there were politicians whose primary goal in life was to get themselves reelected.

  “Iraqi Defense Minister General al-Hirai,” Marlin began, pulling out a tablet and switching it on. “We’ve followed up on the data you provided, and our analysis indicates that your people were correct. Al-Hirai’s department is indeed engaged in torture and other activities that clearly violate accepted standards of human rights.”

  Once upon a time, Sommer reflected, he would have assumed a solid statement like that would be followed by an equally solid plan of action. Now, though, experience and cynicism had set in. “And?” he prompted.

  “And unfortunately,” Marlin said, though without any regret that Sommer could detect, “current U.S. foreign policy requires that we leave any consequences to the Iraqi government.”

  “Which will do nothing.”

  “We don’t know that,” Marlin said. “The Iraqis have made great strides in the past few years toward modernizing their nation and their human rights record. They may very well decide that this case warrants some attention.”