by Bart Kosko
None that we can see. Then terrorists murdered the financier of Water Dragon.
“Jesus. Have the respect to call the company Black Sun in my presence.”
Please pardon the synonym. Your words are yours to use as you see fit. I just wish to present the recent events and advance a conjecture. For I believe you are now in the greatest of danger.
“No shit. The cops will think I murdered Denise. My prints and semen are all over her. I’m sure I left some blood on the floor.”
You did.
“So they’ll have my DNA match in minutes. I should call Eytan and tell him.”
I advise that you wait to call Eytan at least until you arrive at Richard’s warehouse.
“You don’t trust the Israelis?”
Richard has more secure communications. The police will wonder why you called the Israeli government before you called them.
“You’re right. I’m too nervous to think straight. I’d also like to get out of this Jeep and into a bed sometime before the state grabs me and puts me in line for lethal injection.”
John. Try to relax. You might eat some more of those bagels to keep up your energy.
“Your personal intelligent agent. Man’s best friend. The bagels are a week old and hard as rocks.”
I want only to help you maximize your utility.
“I know that and I love you for it. You’d know that if only somehow I could get you laid.”
I return to my conjecture. You may have been in little danger if you had not found the scars on the chiphead’s scalp. Tabriz may have wanted only to infiltrate the operations of Black Sun. We may never know. But we can be sure that those who killed Denise and installed the chip will know that you have discovered them. The odds are good they know already. You thwarted their plan.
“So this time they will try to kill me?”
Yes.
“Can’t the police protect me?”
John. I am surprised that you of all people would expect refuge from the state bureaucracy. The guilty parties here are both highly intelligent and vigilant in their cause.
“What about Richard? Do you think I should trust him?”
Only if you cannot find like scars on his scalp. You should not tell him about his sister unless you are sure of his identity.
“I hate to play games like that. But you’re right again. If he is a chiphead then he’ll be waiting to kill me. Hell. They are twins or were twins. Richard a chiphead. That would be just like his high-tech fanatical ass to end up like that. He’d likely love it.”
You must prepare yourself for that outcome. And you must proportion your belief to the evidence no matter how strange the evidence appears.
“You still think we should go to Richard’s?”
Yes. The other alternative is to return to Nevada. But you need rest and there is little safety in this vehicle. Most of all you need to explore the nanochip you hold in your hand.
“Bet they would like to kill me to get this back.”
No doubt.
“Think about that. I hold in my hand the mind of the great Hamid Tabriz. At least I hold some of his mind. You can bet that murderous fuck backed this up.”
You may also hold in your hand the soul of your fiancée.
Chapter 15
Downtown Los Angeles
Southern California
John let Jism park the Jeep in a deep underground lot in downtown L.A. Jism had found no news of Denise’s death in the media but John still thought the police had followed them. So John risked the longer walk at night through the old cracked streets where the homeless lived after almost a decade of large earthquakes. The Big One never came and released the pent-up stress energy but a series of lesser quakes did.
Some of the homeless sat or slept on the ground. Others watched old TVs that they had mounted with small satellite dishes. Many of the homeless stood in long lines outside the green city outhouses or in front of the new welfare vending machines. Only one grizzled old man asked John for cash as John walked by. John shook his head and walked on to the old subway in the Rebuild L.A. Science Park.
Richard Cheng rented part of a warehouse in the park behind Figeuroa. There Richard had set up the L.A. branch of Water Dragon. In minutes John stood outside the old gray warehouse made of cracked concrete and particle board.
John now felt sure that no one had followed him.
“Jism?” he whispered.
Yes?
“Can you port to Richard’s computer net as soon as we walk in?”
I always have in the past.
“I just want to be sure that you can see as well as hear. I’m going straight for that Glock.”
Please be careful. The gun control laws are severe in Los Angeles and quite so for an unlicensed nine-millimeter semiautomatic sidearm. Have you had firearm instructions?
“Cork it.”
Imagine what would have happened if you had had the Glock in the Jeep when the border patrolmen searched it.
John found the plastic key in his pocket and slid it through the door slot. The door opened to darkness and John could hear Richard talking to someone. John walked in on the balls of his feet. He saw Richard taping himself in front of a blue screen for the Hoover demo.
A second screen showed the Black Sun process as a glossy cartoon. Lasers pulsed to time and to energize and even to program the porky ball carbon molecules. The porky balls split the precious hydrogen from the oxygen molecules in water. H2O poured in one tube. Hydrogen and oxygen poured out their own tubes at the end of the process. Waste hydroxy radicals poured out a third tube that fed back to the splitting system.
On a third screen a porcupine wore sunglasses and had chrome quills that stood on end. The creature moved its lips to track Richard’s lips as he synched the voice-over. The system used the latest netware for motion estimation but it still had to train on Richard’s patterns of speech and body language.
John wanted to shout that there was no way he would get in front of the Boulder bureaucrats and the Texans and the Israelis with that talking porcupine. But he knew that in the end it was his fault for coining the term porky ball.
John had nicknamed his carbon molecule that because of the hundreds of electrons in its outer shells. He thought of the fleeting molecule in the math sense as a hypercube with trillions of corners or quills. The name had stuck and even the Israelis used it in state documents. The Israelis were also the first to create a porky ball long enough to split water before the outer electrons peeled off and the molecule cooled to a new energy minimum.
John thought of this and saw once more how much he missed Alon Gorenberg and his research team in Eilat.
Richard seems to have prepared a multimedia surprise for you.
“This is what happens when a kid watches too many cartoons,” John whispered. “Is the Glock still in the safe?”
It should be. No one has opened the safe in four days.
“I just hope I remember the combination.”
I remember it.
Richard saw John as he crept to the safe and kneeled and opened it.
Richard stopped the taping and the lights came on in the warehouse. His own raisin had spoken to him.
“What do you think?” Richard said. “This could launch porky as a lunchbox franchise!”
“It’s all right.”
“So you like it? Wait till you see the whole animation. I’ve got the hydrogen molecules lining up and spinning just like the light fairies in Fantasia!”
“Jesus fucking Christ. How old are you?”
“John boy. My raisin tells me there’s a problem.”
“What did Sun Tzu say?” John said.
John walked up to Richard along the far wall of the warehouse and kept the Glock low at his right side.
“He says you just picked up the pistol. What happened to your face?”
“You tell me.”
“Hey. You’re serious. What’s wrong? Is Denise all right?”
“She’s just fine.”
Then John tackled Richard and pinned him to the floor with one of the first grappling holds he had learned in wrestling. John had over 30 pounds on Richard and most of it was muscle. He took a muscle enzyme tablet once a week to slow the breakdown of the muscle mass he built in a gym every third week.
“What the hell?” Richard said.
“I just want to see if you still have dandruff.”
John moved the Glock’s barrel through Richard’s thick black hair. There were no scars on his scalp.
Jism learned from the tackle. Jism had watched John for more than two years and knew most of his likes and dislikes. The likes and dislikes formed a bumpy choice surface or preference map in his software. Hills stood for likes. Valleys stood for dislikes. Jism had never seen John assault someone. Now the agent had to learn and reshape part of the choice surface to account for the evidence.
Richard is not a chiphead. Please do the right thing and let him up.
John jumped back from Richard and stood up.
“Sorry. I thought you might have a chip in your brain.”
“What!”
“Jism. Tell Sun Tzu the story.”
Richard looked worried now as well as ruffled in his khaki outfit. Sun Tzu had already told Richard that Denise was dead. The background on Hamid Tabriz and recent world events would take longer.
“I will tell you. But you’ll trust Jism more than me and this is life and death.”
Richard’s eyes watered and he lowered his head for a tearless cry.
John suspected that death hurt more the closer two people were in gene space. Nearly identical twins were as close as two distinct genomes got.
“Why the hell did I get involved with you?” Richard said and he broke down and cried outright.
“Knock it off. I did not kill Denise. The great fucking Hamid Tabriz did.”
“You just left her body on the floor?”
“Richard. We are in danger. They killed Denise and they tried to kill me. And they sure as hell will try to kill you.”
You don’t know that.
“Sure I do. Richard. Save the grief for later. I loved Denise too.”
“Bullshit.”
Richard lunged at John and punched John in the solar plexus.
John crumpled in a pain spasm and saw the flashing blue lights that he sometimes saw on hot desert days when he stood up too fast. John tried to speak but the blow had knocked the air out of him. Richard had studied kempo karate for years and knew how to throw a front punch. John dropped to his knees and tried to breathe. He still held the Glock to his side and rubbed it against the nanochip in his pants pocket.
Richard moved his fingers through John’s short brown hair.
“My turn,” Richard said with most of his old self back. “I have to make sure you don’t have a chip in your brain.”
Chapter 16
Outside of Kirovabad
Azerbaijan
“Show me where,” Captain Bavarian said.
Both men sweated in their shirts in the midday heat. The Sturgeon tried not to look the dark young captain in the eyes. The Sturgeon’s ribs hurt from the captain’s beating. He did not want the captain to see how much he wanted to kill him. The Sturgeon just wanted to get free of the man and leave Azerbaijan for good.
Captain Bavarian tapped the Sturgeon’s chest with his balled right fist. A herd of tan goats stopped chewing the thin grass to watch them.
“I told you,” the Sturgeon said. “He sat in his car right here where I stand.”
“Little fish. Listen to me. I think you have so many purple spots on your face because that bull goat kicks you when you suck him. Maybe we should see. Look at me when I talk to you! Coward! You know what else I think? I think you made a deal with the Israeli and then you killed him. Maybe you used your friends and maybe not. We’ll find out. Either way you have betrayed Azerbaijan!”
“Look what he did to me! My head!”
“Your friends could have hit you on the forehead. Maybe you tried to double-cross them too. I think I will have you shot. I will have you interviewed first but then I will have you shot.”
“I am telling you all I know! Please!”
“Why did he leave the lithium tube in the club’s parking lot? Where did he go? We have no intelligence that he tried to cross the border. You took our money and then you took his. You are a whore as well as a traitor!”
Bavarian slapped the Sturgeon so hard that the young gangster began to cry.
“Little fish! Look at me! I am not even convinced he was an Israeli spy. Why would he care about this pipeline? Israel buys its oil from the Sibers and the Americans. Liar! I should shoot you right here.”
The Sturgeon saw the pipe rupture before Bavarian finished his threat.
Sweat poured down his neck and back. The sweat stained the yellow silk suit that he had bought with the proceeds of his first Turkish opium deal. He wanted to speak but did not want the captain to slap him again.
Bavarian pulled his Beretta M-92 from his black leather hip holster.
“Yes,” Bavarian said. “I think I will shoot you. I think I will shoot you now.”
“No! No! Look! Look at the pipe. It’s melting!”
Captain Bavarian turned to look at the olive Tamraz pipeline.
The gray goo had eaten through two sections of the pipe and left a lake of brown-black oil in the reddish dirt. The pipe had shutoff valves every 50 meters. Terrorists had bombed it for years. Bavarian had twice seen bombed sections of the pipeline but they did not look like this.
The gray goo moved toward Bavarian and the Sturgeon and the rest moved away from them. New oil jets shot out as the nanoacid ate through the shutoff valves on a new stretch of pipe. Two families of shepherds ran their sheep and goats off at right angles from the melting pipe.
“My God,” Bavarian said. “They’re attacking us! It’s some kind of sabotage! Like that oil boat!”
“I told you,” the Sturgeon said. “The Israeli came here and set it up. I told you he was a spy!”
Bavarian shot the Sturgeon point-blank in the breastbone.
The impact slammed the skinny young man on his back next to the captain’s green Jeep. The Sturgeon’s eyes bulged in shock and looked down at the black rent in his suit. He could not breathe but he still tried to speak.
“Why?” he said.
“Why do you think? Because you let this happen!”
“I helped you,” the Sturgeon tried to say.
“Not enough. Traitor!”
Captain Bavarian had already worked out the day’s report in his head. He still had many seconds before he had to go to the Jeep and call in the meltdown. The pipeline sensors would already have sent their report to the National Oil Company of Azerbaijan and to the army’s headquarters in Baku. Soon the NOCA computers would pay one of the Chinese or Japanese satellites to retask and watch the meltdown. The state troops and NOCA repair squads would arrive a few minutes later.
Bavarian squeezed the trigger on the big nine-millimeter. He marveled at how fast he got off the next four rounds.
Chapter 17
Downtown Los Angeles
Southern California
“Richard,” Eytan said on the secure screen. “Your sister was a fine woman. You have all our condolences.”
Richard nodded at the screen and returned to the golden chip on the console.
The chip had the standard design of one main input port and one main output port. Richard used light to act as the input and output fiber bundles. Each color or wavelength defined a data path the chip could use. The computer searched through trillions of such schemes for wavelength multiplexing. A few would unlock part of the chip while too many wrong guesses played out in light might break a code and scramble the chip.
“John,” Eytan said. “Have you finished the water demo?”
“That’s the least of our problems,” John said.
“I appreciate your loss. We have suffered many losses here as well. Mean
while the demo is a little more than a day away.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Plenty of time for that in the grave,” Eytan said.
“We’ll have the demo done in time,” Richard said without looking up.
John. It may not be safe for you and Richard to attend the demo. Remember the 77% truth rate from Eytan’s last transmission.
“I don’t know if it is safe,” John said. “Why didn’t you warn us about Tabriz?”
“I told you he killed a man when he was 13. What else can I tell you? They also say he had committed the entire Koran to memory by age five. But they say that about many mystics.”
“The trouble is my vocal-stress analyzer said you lied 23% of the time in that same message. Reply.”
Eytan laughed and held the slight grin.
“All I can say to that is get a new stress analyzer. Or go back and read the manual on the one you have. I thought a word to the wise was sufficient.”
“You know what I mean. This chiphead business. Israeli intelligence had to have had something on it. It’s too radical a biotechnology for you not to hear of it. And it’s too much of a potential threat to your side of the world. You knew a hell of a lot more than you were telling. I’m sure you still do.”
John. Relax. Anger hands the advantage to the calmest contestant.
“It’s a matter of security classifications and need to know. You would understand if you were in the army. How could we foresee that Tabriz would target your fiancée?”
“I had a need to know yesterday when I asked you about him. I bet you guys have connected all the Tabriz dots by now. And your goddamned security classifications almost derailed the project.”
You don’t know that. Indeed Eytan may have wanted to watch how you and Richard dealt with the chiphead.
“John. I appreciate your anger but this won’t bring back Denise. And come to think of it. Tabriz may have saved Denise’s brain on some other chip or file cube.”
“We already thought of that,” Richard said.
Snow speckled the screen with Eytan. The lights in the room went dim and then returned to normal.
“What was that?” Eytan said.