A horrified look came over his face.
Metzger hadn’t made it. They had been just a few minutes away from getting him to an ambulance. But they had been too late.
As hardened as Desh was, he reeled from the loss. For a few seconds he couldn’t breathe, as though he had been sucker punched in the gut. His reaction told Kira everything she needed to know. A tear escaped from her eye and rolled down her face.
Desh forced his mind back from the depths of despair. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He would have to mourn the loss of his friend another time. He and Kira had a long night ahead of them. They couldn’t afford to be questioned and would need to slip away while everyone was distracted.
Desh lifted his friend so the fire wouldn’t take his body, and he and Kira headed toward the entrance. While it was possible the assault team was still in Metzger’s lab surrounded by flame, Desh was nearly certain that they had escaped.
But who were they? Where had they gotten their information? And what was their ultimate objective? He had absolutely no idea.
All he knew for sure was that Kira and their group were no longer off the grid. That they had been caught with their pants down by a lethal and exceedingly capable adversary. And that this unknown adversary was almost certain to strike at them again.
PART ONE
“Internet servers worldwide would fill a small city, and the K (the world’s most powerful supercomputer) sucks up enough electricity to power 10,000 homes. The incredibly efficient brain sucks up less electricity than a dim lightbulb and fits nicely inside our head. The human genome, which grows our body and directs us through years of complex life, requires less data than a laptop operating system.”
—Mark Fischetti, Computers vs. Brains
Scientific American, November, 2011
1
Seth Rosenblatt paused on his way to the parking lot to take in his surroundings. No matter how many visits he made to this place, how many times he walked the tranquil, idyllic wooded grounds, he always felt awe-struck and privileged to be here, where giants had stood on the shoulders of other giants to see ever farther into the previously impenetrable secrets of nature. Here was a cloistered retreat that had welcomed and financed the likes of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Godel, Alan Turing, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Freeman Dyson. For a physicist there was no more hallowed ground.
He soaked in the ambience of Princeton’s fabled Institute for Advanced Study one last time before walking to his rental car, wanting to put off leaving the grounds for as long as he could manage, especially since he was going straight to the airport for a brutal flight to Tokyo. He hated flying. He hated lines and pat downs and cramped seats with too little legroom for his lanky body. He hated stale, recycled, dehydrating airplane air. A trip from the East Coast to Japan, with a stop in California, seemed never-ending.
Just as he entered the nearly deserted lot where he had parked, a white minivan appeared out of nowhere and began hurtling toward him. Rosenblatt froze, waiting for the driver to see him and take corrective action. Precious seconds passed before he was finally able to comprehend the incomprehensible: the driver hadn’t just failed to see him for a brief moment; the driver had seen him and was intent on turning him into road kill.
His muscles tensed for action but he knew at a visceral level that it was too late: he couldn’t possibly remove himself from the vehicle’s path in time. He closed his eyes and braced for the bone crushing impact.
Mercifully, the impact never came. At the last instant the minivan swerved sharply and screeched to a halt in front of him, its side doors only two feet from his face.
Rosenblatt’s profound terror transformed into pure rage, directed squarely at the asshole who had dared to scare him so intensely. “What in the hell are you doing?” he bellowed. “Are you crazy?”
While he was shouting the minivan’s side door began to glide open. As the sight of this pierced through his fog of rage, alarm bells blared in his head. Panicked, he began to spin around to face what he now guessed was there.
Before he could turn, his arm was seized in an iron grip. As Rosenblatt’s instincts had warned him, someone had stealthily—almost magically—maneuvered behind him. The man twisted Rosenblatt’s arm painfully behind his back and used the limb to propel him through the now open minivan door, where a partner was waiting to catch him as he spun inside.
As Rosenblatt struggled to grasp what was happening he felt the bite of a syringe as it was plunged into his leg, straight through his pants. He tried to make sense of the pain message coming from his thigh, but his thoughts were strangely disjointed, and by the time he realized he had been stabbed, and with what, his body went totally limp and a blanket of darkness rushed up to greet him.
“Well done,” the driver said to his two associates. And with that, he pulled out of the lot and drove calmly through the streets of Princeton, as though he were a senior citizen intent on nothing more than enjoying the scenery.
2
Seth Rosenblatt’s return to consciousness was sudden, but his eyes were still heavy and he only managed to open them halfway. Seated across a small metal table from him was the driver of the minivan, holding an empty syringe, which no doubt had been used to revive him. The man had the patient look of someone who was happy to give his prisoner time to fully regain his faculties and take stock of his situation and surroundings.
Both of Rosenblatt’s hands were cuffed to a steel chair that was affixed to the floor, and he was inside a small, windowless steel shed, a portable structure you might buy at Home Depot to put in your yard and store your rakes and lawnmowers. But this one was pristine. For all he knew it, and he, were still in a Home Depot.
He realized with a start that his watch and clothes had been removed, and he was now wearing a zippered one-piece gray jumpsuit. He tried to ignore his drug-induced lethargy and growing panic and focus. He had to concentrate.
A large dose of adrenaline hit his bloodstream and blasted the last bit of grogginess from his system, but he retained his slumped posture and nearly closed eyes to buy more time.
What was going on? He was the last person anyone would want to kidnap. Unless these men knew. But how? It couldn’t be. But even as he thought this he realized there was no other explanation for his abduction and the care, speed, and precision of his abductors.
How long had he been out? He had no way to tell for sure, but he didn’t think it had been long. The makeshift nature of the shed lent support to the thesis that whoever had grabbed him was in a hurry. The fact that they suspected or knew he had advanced technology imbedded in his clothing that could be used to send a distress signal was highly troubling. He had to also assume they knew he would be missed if he was out of touch for too long, which added further support to his hypothesis that little time had elapsed and he wasn’t very far from the Institute. They had also snatched him right before his long flight overseas, when he would be expected to be out of touch for as long as twenty-four hours. Coincidence? He doubted it.
He felt an odd throbbing in both ears and had an eerie suspicion that his every orifice had been probed, and every inch of his body, from his scalp to between his toes, had been checked and rechecked—for what, only his attackers knew.