“We also try to get single people like you with few attachments,” added Desh. “Just in case. If they are married, we prefer those without children. Or with grown kids who are on their own. We’ve mostly adhered to this, although we’ve had to make an exception in a few cases. If a hexad is compromised, this policy helps make it easier for them to go to ground. If this were to happen, anyone with a wife and kids would have it pretty tough. They’d have to join our equivalent of a witness protection program. For everyone else, given a worst case scenario, it would just be a simple matter of faking their deaths and then keeping them off the grid.”
“Faking a death doesn’t sound like a simple matter to me,” said van Hutten.
Desh smiled. “Well, we’ve gotten pretty good at it,” he said. “It’s our best trick.”
There was a long silence in the conference room as the team let van Hutten digest what he had been told up to that point. Jim Connelly took the opportunity to politely excuse himself from the proceedings once again.
Kira thought the aging physicist was holding up surprisingly well. They had escorted him on a few bathroom breaks during this marathon session, and they had taken a few themselves, but other than this they had plowed ahead relentlessly.
Kira gestured at the pink faced physicist. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “We can take a twenty minute break if you’d like. We’re throwing a lot at you all at once. It must be like drinking from a fire hose.”
Van Hutten laughed good naturedly. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “These are all once in a lifetime revelations, so I think I can keep my mind from wandering for a few more hours. What you have going here is truly remarkable. You’re like a well-oiled machine. With these kind of facilities, funding, and the kind of brilliance you can unlock with your therapy, utopia might not be a pipe dream after all.”
Kira frowned. Van Hutten had hit a nerve. Utopia was a far more difficult concept to pin down than she had ever realized. Even if she could wave a magic wand to accomplish anything she wanted to, the issues just got thornier and thornier.
What if you could magically invent ways to totally free up humanity, to mechanize all labor, to make the world so affluent there would be no need for anyone to work to make a living? Would this be utopia? Her study of the science of happiness indicated that this might actually be a disaster.
Humans were worriers by nature. If a person’s mind wasn’t fully occupied they would find endless things to stress about. This trait allowed early humans to anticipate unseen and far future dangers, helping physically unimpressive hominids survive to become the dominant species on the planet. So while leisure and pleasure in moderation were good things, humans needed to be engaged in challenging activities, during which their attention was so utterly absorbed that there was no room for fear or worry or self-consciousness.
Kira knew that contrary to popular belief, humans were happiest, not during lengthy periods of leisure, but when they were growing as people. When they were achieving. When they were striving to overcome difficult and worthwhile challenges, and then overcoming them. When they were feeding a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem through effort. Even the accomplishments of menial labor brought a sense of personal satisfaction far greater than most realized.
Make your utopia too utopian and boredom would set in. And malaise. Some would continue to work hard and challenge themselves at every turn—even if all of their physical and financial needs were taken care of. But many more would fall into the trap of being lulled into a low energy state of endless leisure—and little true happiness. A state of dependence without any real sense of progress, or growth, or accomplishment. A slow poisoning of the soul of the species.
Kira had become convinced that a true utopia was impossible for humans in their current state—no matter what the conditions.
Desh threw her a glance, with an expression that told her he knew exactly what she was thinking and that he was about to take the reins of the conversation for a moment. They had discussed the human condition and utopian dreams at length, and were on the same page, although she didn’t expect him to get into any of this with van Hutten. He didn’t. Instead, he took the opportunity to bring the understandably euphoric physicist back to earth, a place he would need to be for the rest of their discussion.
“Not to burst your bubble,” said Desh, “but while we have some pretty grandiose goals, things are not going nearly as well as we had hoped.” His expression darkened. “On a number of fronts,” he finished grimly.
9
Jake was minutes away from landing, but he wasn’t about to delay the operation just so he could have a ringside seat. Every minute was precious. Between one instant and the next he could lose the element of surprise. Miller and Desh could decide to leave. Anything could happen.
And failing at this point would be unthinkable. To finally have found and cornered them and then squandered the opportunity would be the ultimate tease, far worse than never having found them at all.
From the intel Rosenblatt had delivered, their organization was structured as brilliantly as he had expected. Six member cells, with each member discouraged from learning the identities of the others. Even so, from the descriptions and other clues Rosenblatt had given them, Jake was confident they would identify the other five members of the physicist’s cell—eventually.
The structure of Miller’s group had the advantage that no cell had any knowledge of any other cell. But it had a critical flaw. While the cells had no connections to each other, each was connected to the hub. Which meant that each member knew the identities of the core leadership. Jake was surprised they had allowed this, but then again, given they were all legally dead and thought that no one knew of their existence, this arrangement should have been more than sufficient.
And they had continued to exercise as much caution as they could. They had taken care to make sure that none of their recruits ever learned the address of their facility. Rosenblatt had described how each member of the group was always driven to the facility in the back of a van, with no way to see outside. More polite than asking guests to wear a blindfold, but with the same net effect.
But Rosenblatt had known enough to lead them to the right place anyway. Miller had made one mistake. During one of the many updates she presented to Rosenblatt’s cell, which they called a hexad, she had thrown the wrong presentation up on the screen. It had only remained there for a few seconds before she caught her error, but it had been long enough. The slide had been entitled, Headquarters Building—Artist’s Rendering. An Icon of Denver International was shown at the bottom of the slide and their headquarters was depicted to the northeast. Its perimeter was nothing but large panels of mirrored glass, reflecting its surroundings. The structure was a perfect rectangle two stories tall, and judging from several trees drawn nearby, it wasn’t all that big; perhaps confining fifteen or twenty thousand square feet of space.
They had been lucky. Without seeing this particular slide, Rosenblatt would never have known the approximate dimensions of the building or that the outer perimeter was mirrored, having no way to tell this from inside. Nor would he have known its position with respect to the airport.
Once Jake knew the size and style of building they were looking for; one northeast of the airport and eighty yards from a massive warehouse, he had more than enough to go on. Marshalling the vast resources at his disposal, computer, satellite, and otherwise, his black-ops group had found it almost immediately, and Desh and Miller’s presence there had confirmed it.