by P. W. Singer
She had a clean shot. Unmissable. But she did not take it.
“Todd!” she shouted.
The man turned his head to look at her and was briefly illuminated by the air ambulance’s landing lights as it lifted back up into the night. His face was covered in white bandages, but she almost didn’t notice it because of his eyes. They showed not surprise or anger but recognition—not at his name but at her. And then, as the night went dark again, his eyes disappeared.
“That’s for the best,” he said to her. “The stars can only be enjoyed, can only be truly understood when it is just us, none of our creations to get in the way.”
The wonder she had felt at the very same night sky instantly changed. She noticed how, while most of Washington and Northern Virginia had gone dark, there were lights on out in the farther Maryland suburbs, and to the east and to the south even past Alexandria. You just saw what you wanted to see.
“Get off there,” she commanded. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
Todd nodded his head and then rocked forward, pushing out over the edge of the building with his arms. But he did not jump, instead using the movement to swing his legs back up so he was in a crouch on the low concrete wall. Then he stood, indifferent to the depths of the dark just behind him. His hands extended out above his head, palms wide, claiming it all as creator.
“Seven years ago, I stood in this exact same place,” he said. “I wondered why God did something to me that he didn’t even do to Abraham in the end? For what possible reason were my son and wife sacrificed? And then he answered me: It was my fault. I was responsible for the creations that had destroyed them, as if Abraham had actually pulled that knife across his child’s throat.”
“Then why do it to others?” she asked. “You’d just gone through every parent’s nightmare. Why inflict that pain on others?”
“Sacrifice is sometimes necessary. It was only when I truly lost what was most precious to me that I realized what I had to do to save us all.”
“To ‘save’ us? You’re here tonight trying to kill kids at the same place your son was born and died. That’s not saving, that’s destroying,” Keegan said, keeping the pistol trained on him. “How could you?”
“How could I? How could I not?” he responded. “God sent plague after plague to the Egyptians. But it was only when their arrogance began to threaten the lives of their children that they realized they had to give up their servants, much like us, with our mechanical ones. I did not ask of others any more than the sacrifice I had already made.”
“Not everyone had that choice. Those kids down there in the NICU, they’re innocent of all that.”
“The firstborn children of Egypt were innocent. My son was innocent! Their innocence is what made their sacrifice so compelling, so world-changing.”
“World-changing?” she said. “Bullshit. All you did by trying to play God was hurt people and break things. Nothing more.”
“No, I destroyed something far more important.”
“What?”
“Trust.” He smiled, as if he somehow knew the word had added meaning for her. “Without ever deciding, without ever thinking it through, we grew to trust machines that we don’t even understand to run our adult lives. We grant unexplainable black boxes of code the power to make all the decisions that should matter for us.2 Now we’ll never trust them the same way again, as we never should have. As you never should have, Agent Keegan.”
So he did know her. But from watching her and TAMS on the feeds, or through somewhere, someone, else?
“You know my name, I know yours. Whatever. Get down off there,” Keegan commanded, motioning with the gun. She began to move closer, as if to underscore that he had no choice but to obey. And to show him that she was not afraid.
She heard muffled footsteps on the roof to the left of her, moving through the tangle of rooftop machinery.
“You accomplish your mission?” she asked, knowing who it was without even looking.
“Yes. The NICU is secured,” said TAMS, emerging from behind one of the drone pads.
“Good job, partner,” said Keegan, knowing it would set the man off. “So, Todd, no big finale, all because I trusted one of those monstrous machines you tried to make everyone so scared of.”
“That’s disappointing, Agent Keegan. I was told you thought of that thing as just a tool.”
She didn’t like the idea that he was throwing her words back at her. She liked even less what it meant he also had access to. “You were ‘told’? That means you’re no different than TAMS. In fact, it means you’re the same.” She paused. “You’re just Shaw’s ‘tool.’”
“We all have our roles to play,” Todd said, without any pause or tone of denial. “Mr. Shaw simply came to the same realization that I did, that things had to change.”
She glanced at TAMS, furrowing her brow in what it would know was an inquiring look.
“He is telling the truth,” TAMS said.
Another air ambulance began its descent, landing lights washing over the rooftop. In that flare of light and the swirling air, Keegan saw Todd’s shirt lift. Underneath, he was wearing a tan hunter’s shooting vest. Instead of shotgun shells, though, each sleeve in the bandolier held a glass tube filled with what looked like a block of wax covered by a thin layer of clear liquid.
Unable to push the notice to Keegan’s glasses, TAMS identified the danger aloud.
“Warning, Agent Keegan!” TAMS announced in a raised tone of alarm. “There is a high likelihood that Mr. Todd is armed with an improvised incendiary device.”
“Explain. Tell me what we’re dealing with here,” she commanded, as Todd’s face curled in a smile.
“A holding company within the VDO Associates network has made purchases of phosphate, carbon black, and silica,” TAMS said. “Another firm within the network, presenting itself as a research lab, purchased a humidifying environmental system, pressure reactor, filter, condenser, and extruder pump, as well as a rotary evaporator system. Using these components, the precursor substances could be converted by an expert into a material matching the appearance of the unknown substance in the glass: white phosphorus.”3
Keegan knew white phosphorus by its military nickname. “Willie Pete” was a pyrophoric; the second it was exposed to the air, it would ignite into an explosive white flame that burned at thousands of degrees.4 While it was frowned upon by the JAG lawyers, they’d occasionally used smoke rounds packed with small amounts of white phosphorus for what they called “shake and bake” strikes against insurgents hunkered in a bunker or basement.5 Willie Pete burned so hot that afterward, literally the only thing left was the outline of their body on the wall.
“So that was the plan all along, to go out in a blaze of glory?” Keegan asked Todd.
In her head, she worked out the various scenarios. However she played it, though, it ended the same way. Any shot that she took at Todd would set off the devilish device, either hitting it directly or the glass breaking when his body fell.
“It was never about me,” Todd replied. “When I’m gone, there’ll be no trace for any person to blame, only the machines, like your ‘partner’ that failed.”
At that TAMS moved forward, a careful crouching advance of just two steps, as if taking Todd’s measure.
“I already died here that night long ago,” Todd said. “Everything since has been to make it right.”
It all came together at once.
Todd bringing his arms down, moving to wrap them over his chest and smash the explosive glass tubes that hung on the vest.
Kissing the top of Haley’s head that very first time in the hospital room, just a few floors below.
Jumping into the surf at La Jolla, hand in hand with Jared.
Holding her hands on her knees as she vomited all over her running shoes, the fastest finisher at boot camp.
Her mother smiling, as chocolate ice cream dripped down onto the report card with straight A’s.
&nbs
p; The blur moving past her, as TAMS leaped across the rooftop into Todd and then over the edge.
A flash of intense white light.
Heat.
Buzzing all over her body.
Then nothing.
A silence as if she had never existed.
Georgetown University Hospital
Washington, DC
“Haley, get off the bed! I told you to be careful with Mommy.”
Keegan woke to sharp pain in her side, as Haley clambered onto the hospital bed to snuggle her. That was what love felt like.
As her eyes struggled to open, she felt Jared’s fingers wrap around her left hand, a tentative and searching connection.
“Where am I?” She tried to say more, but her mouth was too dry.
“You’re still at Georgetown Hospital. Take your time,” Jared said, handing her a cup of water with a straw to sip from, as the bed slowly raised itself up, sensing she was awake now.
She tried to push herself up farther, but her right hand wouldn’t respond.
“It’s OK,” Jared said quickly. “They gave you a nerve blocker there for the burns.”
As the haze began to clear, she looked around the room, her vision blocked slightly by what must have been a bandage just above her left eye. Her right arm was completely wrapped in bandages and her left leg was stabilized in some kind of cast. She didn’t have the heart to know what her face looked like, but she reasoned it couldn’t be that bad if Haley was in the room. As she looked around the room filled with balloons, flowers, and get-well cards, several of them registered her making eye contact and began to play dueling cloying tunes and trite audio messages.
“Stop,” she rasped, and the cards went silent.
“Most of them are from family, but there’s a few from some pretty heavy hitters,” Jared said, picking up a card out of the back. As he opened it, a 3-D image projected what Keegan had seen before—the ocean view from Shaw’s California estate.
“See how pretty it is, Mommy?” Haley said.
“Wait, it gets better,” Jared said, setting an angular matte-gray-framed card down on the bed in front of her.
The panorama shifted with a slight shimmer, and the entire picture came into improbably sharp focus. It was an expensive effect. Then Shaw appeared walking toward them, speaking through the card.
“Agent Keegan, I want to thank you for the sacrifice you have made for your country, yet again. We all owe you a great deal—in fact, everything. None of this could have happened without you. If there is anything I can do to aid you, in turn, please let me know.”
He was mocking her. And at that, she felt a little bit of that same raw anger that had fueled everyone else Shaw had been behind. With her good leg, she violently shook the bed and knocked the card to the floor. Jared picked it up, placing it behind a card featuring the grinning face of the DC police commissioner.
“What was that about?” Jared asked.
Keegan just closed her eyes and burrowed her face into the top of Haley’s head, as perfect a place as any to try to forget it all.
“It’s OK, Mommy, you’ll be all better soon,” Haley said.
“With you here, butterfly, how could I not?” she replied.
One day she would have to stop lying to her daughter. But what could she say? She could barely admit to herself what she had just experienced.
She gave Haley a kiss on the forehead—human connection that could not be replaced, the bond between parent and child. What Todd had lost, and what had driven his crusade for Shaw.
“OK, Haley, you really do need to get down now. Mommy needs her space,” said Jared.
“Agent Keegan!” a voice called from the doorway.
Noritz.
“Glad to see you awake,” he said, entering the room with a pronounced smile. It seemed he was claiming her again, which meant his bosses must have been happy about the outcome. He stopped a few feet short of the bed, however, as if unsure of how welcome he would be. “I’ve got someone else to see you,” Noritz said. “Your old friend . . . Booted back up and brought straight to you.”
Stepping out from behind Noritz came TAMS.
“Hello,” the machine said, as if presenting itself anew.
Haley jumped off the bed and ran to the robot. “TAMS!!!”
Just as a human body’s imperfections make it unique and identifiable, the nicks and dents around where Haley hugged the robot were an immediate giveaway. It was the TAMS that had been shelved and hung on a rack just days earlier.
“My original assigned resource?” Keegan asked. She tried to use words Haley wouldn’t understand the full meaning of. The girl had gone through enough; there was no need to add more confusion about her new friend and savior.
“Correct,” said Noritz. “Not much left of the, um, other one. This one’s baseline stops when we powered it down; don’t worry, it still knows everything you taught it.”
Not everything . . . Thankfully.
“I thought it’d make a nice get-well gift,” he said, the two of them knowing it was more like a peace offering. “Maybe get the old team back together.” He paused. “When you’re ready, of course.”
“Thank you for that,” she said.
Jared scooped Haley up. “Come on, they’ve got work stuff to talk about. Let’s go grab a snack.”
The little girl waved to TAMS and blew Keegan a kiss.
Noritz shut the door behind them and sat down heavily in an overstuffed vinyl chair, the deep purple color of a bruise. “You doing OK?” he asked.
“Everything hurts,” Keegan said.
“I bet,” he said.
“And the case?”
“Nothing left to do but suck up Todd with a dustbuster . . . Ah, um, that was inappropriate. Forget I said that, TAMS.”
“OK,” said TAMS.
Noritz ran ChapStick around his lips, the same tell as ever that he was having to do something he’d prefer not to. “You ready to talk about what we need to talk about?”
She nodded, wincing at the pain behind her temples. She’d have to be careful, not just with what she’d discovered during the last moments of Todd’s life, but to avoid leading Noritz or anybody else in the FBI to reexamine her own past, maybe no longer so deeply buried.
“TAMS, go wait outside,” he said. “Then enter standby mode.”
“So, it seems you’re getting the hang of working with it,” she said.
“The word from the top is get used to it. The hospital surveillance video of that machine running in to save all those babies and then tackling Todd to save you before he lit off his vest . . . It’s everywhere. Hell, a few years from now all the preschools are going to be filled with a bunch of little kids named ‘TAMS.’ No way the Bureau is going to squander a win like that.”
“Shit,” said Keegan. “I’m guessing that didn’t make Bosch too happy.”
“The director told Bosch to pound sand,” he said. “You’re blessed now too, as long as you can clear something up for the case record.” He chewed his cheek and stopped speaking.
“You want to know how I found Todd?”
A nod. “We know how Modi gave you that TAMS unit, but we don’t know how it led you to the hospital.”
“A hunch,” said Keegan. “That unit I received from Modi didn’t have FBI network access, so we just used what we had and went there on a hunch.” She did not want to divulge the role that Shaw played, at least not yet.
“Then with all the comms down, we couldn’t wait to call in backup,” she added. It was a good thing the robot had left the room. It was the sort of lie that TAMS’s sensors would have seen right through. But it was a lie that Noritz wanted to hear, one that threw him a lifeline inside the bureaucracy by keeping any mention of his attempt to bury her out of the official file. He now owed her.
Noritz looked around the room, as if wondering who was listening in. “In the official record, you’ll also have to leave the part about Modi out,” he said quietly. “And that order is from w
ell above my pay grade.”
“How high?”
“The highest possible. The FBI suspended the agent who saved the city and the CIA supplied her with an off-the-books robot sidekick. So, rather than investigate everybody into retirement about how this good deed actually got done, the president sat the two directors down and told them they need to eat shit sandwiches and smile to the public about how good they tasted. Everybody’s got enough to do cleaning up Washington, and the White House doesn’t want to lose momentum on the basic income commission’s reforms and all the other policy crap that they’re using this crisis to ram through Congress.”
That set something off in her brain, but it was all still fuzzy. “So, we’re going to act like it was all planned this way?”
“Yeah. Same for the TAMS program. Trial run’s over. None of the other field office tests had anywhere near the same outcome as yours, but screw ’em. Everything’s been a ‘complete success,’ if that wasn’t clear by now. We’re all the way on this. The Bureau is buying TAMS units for every single field office around the country. After that, federal grants for state and local police departments to buy their own. Like they’re going to know what to do with them. But anyway, the public is asking for it, to feel safe again. So the White House is getting ahead of the curve, to make it a bigger win—its win.”
“What have we unleashed?” Keegan asked.
“Yeah, I’m not sure Todd would appreciate everything he just jump-started.”
She jerked upright as the realization hit her. Shaw hadn’t just played her; he’d played everyone.
Jackson Todd. Senator Jacobs. The whole network of extremists. Even her and TAMS. They had all been the same to Shaw: investments in a revolution on his terms. A series of moves all to take a society struggling with change to its lowest point and then remake it.
It hadn’t been about fighting the future, but making it come true.
Keegan sighed and lay back, taking it all in.
“I’ll let you rest,” Noritz said. “When you’re ready to come back to work, you can let me know what you want to do. There’s nothing wrong with letting the Bureau put you out on the vizcast circuit until retirement. Hell, besides all the little babies being named after TAMS, ‘Lara’ and ‘Keegan’ are trending, as well.”