by Bart Kosko
“Power brownout,” Richard said. “Don’t worry. We’ve been getting them in L.A. almost every day now for a week. We have backup battery packs for the computers.”
“Eytan,” John said. “You’re still not coming clean with us. I read about the tests on rat brains. We all did. All the tests destroyed the brain tissue when they tried to decode it. What technique did Tabriz use?”
“Who knows? The most I can tell you is that Tabriz seems to have had a lot of practice. And that’s just rumor.”
“This is bullshit,” Richard said. “We have to call the police right now.”
“Once again,” Eytan said. “You don’t want to go to jail for murder. Call now and they will book both of you for murder. They will confiscate all your files and all of hers. You might get off in time but it would not be for a long time. Meanwhile all you have worked for will be gone.”
His veracity factor climbed to 96% on this last statement.
“I bet your people have already cleaned up her cabin,” John said.
Richard looked up from the chip to watch Eytan’s expression.
“That’s a bet I won’t take,” Eytan said with the same thin smile.
“We won’t be safe if we drive back to Nevada,” John said. “The cops or anyone else could stop us.”
“You’re not safe where you are.”
“I know that. Why don’t you send some of your people to get us out of here?”
“I’ve been working on that. Have to go now. Sit tight and don’t lose that chip.”
Eytan cut the transmission on the Cauchy beamformer.
The image of Eytan had not been as clear and vivid as it had been the day before on the road from Hoover Dam. The Cauchy beamformer made up for that in security. An eavesdropper had no more chance of catching part of the signal than an airplane pilot had of knowing where lightning would flash next in a storm.
“Good,” Richard said when the screen turned to snow. “Now let’s see what the chip wants to show us.”
The screen scrolled through thousands of learning modules.
Richard stepped through some of the movement and speech modules. Some modules learned with adaptive filters and others used straight neural networks. Some used neural nets to learn and tune fuzzy rules and to grow complex logic trees of binary rules.
Richard and John could not grasp the coding schemes that someone had used to map body movements and speech to strings of numbers. The modules all seemed to interlock and feed back onto one another. A few command modules used logic trees to control the learning modules and to assign the right mix of spectral algorithms. They seemed to be the roots of the command tree but Richard and John could not be sure. The wiring diagrams of the modules looked as tangled and confusing as did a brain’s wet tangles of neural circuits.
Richard copied the chip output to his console. He also made a backup chip as he scrolled through the modules and the Arabic command text.
The lights dimmed again in a brownout and stayed dim.
“Shit,” Richard said. “We’ll lose some data in the transfer.”
The lights came back to full power and then flickered twice more.
“Got it,” Richard said. “Watch this. Right from the top of the buffer. A Tabriz-eye view of the world. But no sound.”
The screen turned red and then stabilized on the red and yellow sap inside the baby egg. New images tumbled across the screen with greater speed as Richard’s system locked onto the chip’s coding schemes and hyptertext transfer protocols.
John’s Jeep pulled into the driveway at sunset. John’s lips moved in speech and puckered for a kiss. Red and purple peonies flowered on the wall. The image blurred and then focused on Denise’s naked white breasts pressed against the black floor and her chest rising and falling with John’s thrusts.
“You son of a bitch,” Richard said.
“We need to show this to the police,” John said and touched his swollen lip.
“What? You fucking my sister?”
“No. This fight scene. It proves self-defense.”
Richard shook his head and watched the room spin as Denise back-fisted John in the mouth.
Richard does not believe that the police will find him in any way responsible for his sister’s death. He is still in shock.
“I know that.”
“What?”
John shook his head.
The image sequence slowed as Denise fell to the floor.
“Oh no,” Richard said. “We tripped something. It must have sent a self-destruct message. Look! The cells are dissolving!”
The image turned to black and Richard ejected the chip from the console.
It was too late. Even the chip’s outer skin had changed from gold to brown as many of the chip’s 3-D stacks of cells had dissolved. Richard handed the chip to John so he could see the damage for himself.
“We need Eytan’s nanoscopes,” John said. “What we really need is for Alon to take this apart.”
“Can we get it to him?”
“No chance. The Saudis killed him when they bombed the Eilat plant.”
Richard looked down again and paused.
“You think we should give it to Eytan?” he said.
“Not right away. And we sure as hell will keep the backup.”
“If Eytan wants the chip he will get it. He’ll send some kind of Israeli secret agent to get it. We can’t stop that.”
“You’re still in shock,” John said.
“Don’t dismiss what I say. We can’t stop the Israelis.”
John put the chip in his T-shirt pocket and pulled the Glock nine-millimeter from his waistband. John could see from Richard’s blank face that his Sun Tzu raisin was saying something important to him.
“Dr. Glock can stop them,” John said.
“You desert sociopath. Don’t even think about pulling that gun on them.”
“I’m not going to pull it. I’ll keep it in my hand the whole time when they get here. That’s why they used to call these things peacemakers.”
“Why did I ever get tied up with you?”
“The expected payoff.”
Chapter 18
Baku
Azerbaijan
“No,” Aminzadeh said to Mosarian. “I won’t bomb Israel as the Saudis did.”
Ibn Aminzadeh was president of Azerbaijan and a Muslim who did not believe in Allah. His father had taught him to honor Mecca and its culture but not the god many believed had dwelled there.
Young Ibn had read the Islamic relativist Abdol Karim Soroush. He had proudly told his classmates in petroleum engineering at Tehran University that he was a Muslim but not a fundamentalist. His Shiite enemies had then started a file on him. They shared the data with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Islamic Jihad in Egypt and Lebanon and the National Islamic Front in the Sudan.
Shiite radicals now ran these countries and ran Algeria.
The Shiite radicals made up a growing portion of the world’s three billion Muslims. Azerbaijan was the only Shiite state that still held true multiparty elections. Aminzadeh led the Islamic Democratic Party in a coalition government of theists and socialists.
General Atef Mosarian was both a believer and a socialist.
Mosarian had made it clear to his Azer troops that Aminzadeh had given too much license to the American and Russian oil firms and thus had weakened Azerbaijan. He favored closer ties with the Chinese and Japanese. He now had something he could throw at the Israelis if not at the Americans. He held in his hand Joel Davis’s hologram tube.
He laid it on the dark oak desk in Aminzadeh’s office.
“Mr. President. This spying device is standard Israeli issue. We took it from a known Israeli agent.”
“From whom? Show him to me.”
“I cannot do that. The Israelis snatched him from us in Kirovabad. We do have a room full of witnesses and the taped report of one of our agents.”
“The gangster they call the Sturgeon?”
&nb
sp; “Yes.”
“Your room full of witnesses is a barroom in a whorehouse,” Aminzadeh said. “Where is this gangster agent called the Sturgeon?”
“He proved a security risk. He was after all a known thief and extortionist.”
“I see. So you taped him and then shot him? The world would laugh at him as a witness.”
“I don’t care what the world would laugh at. The Israelis have destroyed the Tamraz pipeline.”
“You have not proved that.”
“I know they did it. Look at this tube! We processed some of the 3-D images. They are all of the Tamraz pipeline. We lost over two hundred thousand barrels of oil!”
“I know what we lost and what it will take to clean the spill. But you do not know that the Israelis sabotaged the pipe. You only believe it. I will not say that you want to believe it because I cannot prove that. I also cannot take your belief to Parliament or turn your belief into a strike command.”
“We know the Greens did this,” Mosarian said. “It was the same superacid that destroyed the Cuban oil tanker! That cannot be a coincidence.”
“I agree. It is not a coincidence. Environmental terrorists commited both acts and there is a good chance that the same terrorists did it. I too have read the intelligence reports. I too saw the WNN report. I understand that over 10 Green groups have claimed responsibility. I also understand that Israel supports the Greens. But the chemist report I read said the two superacids differed.”
“Whoever made one could make the other.”
“I agree with that too. But we need proof. Right now there is no proof that links the Tamraz pipeline to the bombing of the Dhahran oil fields. Greens have bombed our pipelines since I was a boy.”
“So you will do nothing?”
“General Mosarian. I will not launch a missile attack that could ignite a Mediterranean war just to please you. You will recall that I was the first Muslim leader to denounce Israel’s support of the Greens after the Dhahran bombing. I was the first to demand that Israel pay damages to the Saudis. You will also recall that I called for the Muslim nations to discuss whether to impose an oil embargo on Israel.”
“But Israel buys most of its oil from the Americans and the Russians and the Canadians.”
“I know that. They also buy several hundred thousands of barrels from us directly and from us through Cyprus. So I still call for a Muslim embargo. Meanwhile I have decided that we should move ahead on our own and ban all Azer oil exports to Israel and Cyprus. There will be no military reprisals because there is no proof of direct Israeli involvement. No proof and so no reprisals. That is my decision.”
“You already decided this before I came in?” Mosarian said with a forced smile.
“Yes. I signed the executive order over an hour ago.”
“Then why did you call this meeting? You did not want a military opinion?”
“Of course I value your military opinion. But this was not a military decision. I felt you should be the first to know.”
Chapter 19
Tel Aviv
Israel
Colonel Avi Hurwicz sat before a wall map of the Mediterranean and listened to the briefing.
Hurwicz had already scrambled the first wave of Israeli fixed-wing aircraft. He also sent a dozen new Lockheed-Martin ECs over the Mediterranean to gather electronic intelligence from the air and from low-earth orbit satellites. Israel’s 200,000 active soldiers had stayed on alert since the Eilat bombing. About 80% of these troops still served as conscript labor. That worried Avi Hurwicz more than he would ever admit.
Avi Hurwicz and many other Israeli officers opposed the growing demands for a volunteer military. The demands came from a new mix of ultra-Orthodox Jews and pacifists and Palestinians and conservative free-market radicals. One claim was that the draft was slavery. The state should not suspend someone’s freedom to protect someone else’s freedom. The more popular claim was that even a state gets no more than it pays for. If mortal enemies surrounded Israel and if a strong national defense was so dear to the people of Israel, then the people should pay dearly for it. If that meant still higher taxes then so be it. Talk of patriotism was mere propaganda and only hid the real social costs.
Avi and the officers did not agree.
They believed that the force of the state and the patriotic spirit produced better fighting men and women than would simply raising their pay to the market wage rate. They also believed that a draft was cheaper even if the wage gap imposed a net social loss on Israeli society. So what if most of the drafted young men and women could or did earn more than the state paid them for their forced labor? The state paid out less cash and used less tax money. They believed in any case that a draft was fairer because it shared the pain among rich and poor and among smart and dumb. And misery loved company. They had sacrificed some of their freedoms for the state. So could the next generation.
But Avi still had doubts about being a colonel over a largely conscript army. He was not sure that the draft still produced the same will to fight that he had seen in the older officers or that he had heard of from the early days and battles of Israel almost a century ago.
Avi gave little weight to the draft debates on the internet and on the TV talk shows. He did not care that more American Jews than ever married outside their faith and so fewer foreign Jews came back to serve a term in the Israeli Army. Few came anyway. What worried him was that too many young men openly opposed the draft and still managed to get good jobs and get girls. That would never have happened in his youth.
Now Avi Hurwicz had to digest the intelligence report and then brief the Prime Minister in less than five minutes. This was not the time to doubt the chain of command that reached down to the pool of conscripts. The conscripts would die for Israel if the command chain said they would.
“The odds,” Hurwicz said to the young intelligence officer. “I need the odds.”
“We put the probability at 76% that the same people who bombed Dhahran also sabotaged the Hombre and the Azerbaijani pipeline.”
“What is your confidence in that estimate?”
“Somewhere between 80% and 90% depending on the prior probabilities.”
“You mean depending on how you guess?”
“Yes. In the end.”
“So ‘in the end’ the odds are better than 50-50?”
“Yes.”
“One more thing,” Hurwicz said. “Major Baum’s chip theory about Davis. Has he found any hard proof yet to support it?”
“He claims he has.”
“But no one has seen it?”
“No. But Major Baum claims he will show us soon.”
“What does ‘soon’ mean? I can’t go with that.”
“That is all we know.”
“Thank you,” Hurwicz said and rose.
He walked next door to a secure booth and sat before the blue screen.
Avi Hurwicz had called the Saudi response wrong because there had been too little time to make the call. He could not afford to miscall this one. He rubbed his eyes and felt the nerves in his right foot twitch from the six cups of coffee he had drunk in the last two hours. The old cooling system did not cool the air in the booth enough to keep his white shirt from sticking to his back and chest.
Then the rough old face of Prime Minister Ezekiel Sharon appeared on the screen.
“Well?” Sharon said.
“It’s the same group. We can’t be sure which group. We can be reasonably sure the same group destroyed the Tamraz pipeline. The odds are better than 50-50.”
“The CIA report says that the Azers believe your man Davis did this.”
“I have seen the report. It’s true that Joel Davis was there. We believe he had imaged the pipe for routine strike planning.”
“Why was he there at just this time? That looks suspicious.”
“Joel Davis was under deep cover there for over a month. He was pursuing many contacts he made through the Azer criminal underground. We keep many such ea
rs in the mud. Of course we did task Davis with watching the pipeline. That was routine. We don’t know the details of all his pursuits. We know only that he failed to report to his contacts in Baku and in Turkey.”
“So the Azers may be holding him right now?”
“It’s possible. We can’t be sure he ever got out of Kirovabad. The odds are that he is dead.”
“Colonel Hurwicz,” Sharon said. “Will they strike?”
Hurwicz knew he could not hedge the answer with a probability. He had to call it all or none and stand by it.
He could always get back part of his job as a consultant.
“No,” he said. “The Azers won’t strike.”
“Why?”
“The Azer damage is less than the Dhahran damage. And the Azers have far less strike capability than the Saudis have. Their missiles would have to fly across the airspace of Iran and Iraq or Turkey and then across the airspace of Syria or Jordan. That is too far to fly. It would take too many permissions. We would also have more than enough time to lock onto the missile trajectories. The odds are very good that we could repel such a missile strike. We could at least undermine their control and navigation logic.”
“I need more than your good odds. You think that if the Azers strike they will not use long-range cruise missiles?”
“That is correct,” Hurwicz said. “I would expect a terrorist bombing if they strike at all. I don’t think Aminzadeh will approve that.”
“Can you read his mind?”
“I can read our intelligence reports. So far Aminzadeh has kept the military under control. I would expect a strike only if there is a coup.”
“Avi. A coup is just what we might have here if you are wrong. The young people hate both of us.”
Chapter 20
Diamond Bar
Southern California
Richard had been right.
Eytan had sent an Israeli agent to pick up the Tabriz chip. The agent’s name was Daniel. He had come with a second agent named Raquel who posed as his wife. Now the two agents sat in the front seat of John’s Jeep and John and Richard sat in the back. They drove east on the 10 freeway toward the pink and orange sky of the desert predawn.