And then there was Fiona.
The teenaged girl had come into his life as a refugee, the lone survivor of a diabolical act of terrorism, hunted by a relentless villain with almost godlike abilities, desperately in need of a protector, but had instead become something much more.
A woman he would be proud to have as a wife and a daughter he cherished… King had accidentally become a family man, and he deeply believed that family deserved more than just stolen moments between missions. Loving someone was a lot more than just protecting that person from harm.
As he had dropped one sizzling bratwurst after another into a line of split stadium rolls, assembling them in an orderly row on a serving platter, he’d considered just what possibilities for happiness the future might hold, and what path to take to get there.
An insistent vibration in his pocket had thrown a monkey wrench into his musings. His phone: Deep Blue on the other end.
“Can’t this wait?” King had growled, eschewing the normal pleasantries.
“I’ll let you be the judge of that,” the reply had come. “We’ve got him, King. We found Brainstorm.”
That had been the end of the picnic.
3
New Hampshire-Two days earlier
The hamburger King had wolfed down during the short drive from the bungalow to the entrance to Endgame HQ, now sat in his gut like a brick as he waited for the elevator doors to open.
Brainstorm!
Twice now, King had tangled with operatives of what he had dubbed the Brainstorm network, and twice he had narrowly averted unimaginable catastrophe, yet in spite of Brainstorm’s audacity, King knew next to nothing about…it? They? The working hypothesis, a construct of innuendo and supposition, was that Brainstorm was a very sophisticated artificial intelligence-a self-aware computer program-secretly pulling the strings of several multinational corporations and possibly exerting influence in the halls of power, but months of investigation had yielded nothing more than rumors and wild conspiracy theories.
The uncertainty about what shape his own future might take didn’t include Brainstorm. This was personal.
The steel doors slid back and King hastened down a utilitarian corridor and boarded an underground tram that whisked him to the Central portion of the base, ten miles away, under Mount Tecumseh. When he arrived, he disembarked and made his way down another corridor, then burst into the Chess Team op center where Tom Duncan and Lewis Aleman were waiting.
Tom Duncan had once been the leader of the free world-the President of the United States-but King didn’t feel like he knew President Duncan. To him, the athletically built, mostly bald Duncan would always be Deep Blue, the creator, brains and guiding hand of Chess Team.
“Well?” King said, even before the door closed behind him. “Let’s have it.”
Deep Blue nodded, his eyes alight with barely contained enthusiasm. “I’ll let Ale fill you in, since he’s the one who did all the work.”
The lanky Lewis Aleman beckoned King to join him at a workstation. Aleman, a former spec ops shooter and Chess Team’s resident tech expert didn’t have a callsign, but his unofficial nickname was R2D2, because like the stubby robot from the Star Wars movies, when it came to computer systems, there wasn’t much he couldn’t accomplish once he plugged in.
“As you know, I’ve spent the last couple weeks following the money trail from Sokoloff to Brainstorm.”
King nodded absently, his thoughts flashing back to the final confrontation with the Russian hitman in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. Following the brutal struggle, King had found their best lead to unraveling the mystery of Brainstorm-a cell phone that contained a complete record of the hired killer’s dealings with the elusive mastermind.
Aleman gestured to the computer monitor, which displayed rows of numbers. “I’ve had to tread carefully so as not to tip our hand, but I was able to trace the transactions from Sokoloff to an account in the Cayman Islands, and from there to several other accounts.”
King gave the list a second look and saw the dollar signs in the second column. Each account balance ran to eight figures. “So Brainstorm has more money than God. That’s not exactly news.”
The tech expert waved a hand dismissively. “These are just ready cash reserves. Tip of the iceberg. I was able to track dozens of transfers going back two years; Brainstorm, operating through various shell companies, has controlling interests in several multinational corporations, and those assets run well nigh into the trillions. But that’s not the point.
“We’ve been working under the assumption that Brainstorm is an artificial intelligence. I thought that by following the history of the transactions, I’d be able to find a physical location…a bank of computer servers running the AI software.”
“But?”
Aleman shook his head, grinning. “It just wasn’t there. The transactions didn’t originate from any one location. At first, I thought it was just Brainstorm covering its tracks very well, but then something extraordinary happened. Last week, Brainstorm started transferring money out of those accounts-emptied them-and that left a huge footprint.”
The undigested burger churned in King’s gut. “If Brainstorm is moving that much money around, then it must be planning something big.”
“Maybe, but you’re missing the point. The money went to a non-profit foundation-Forward Looking Energy Solutions-which it just so happens was the outfit behind Bluelight.”
King felt another lurch in his stomach at the mention. The memory of what had happened at the Bluelight Technologies experimental power station was, like the scars on his body, still all too fresh. Bluelight had been attempting to harvest energy from naturally occurring antimatter in the upper atmosphere, a process that had inadvertently summoned a horde of monstrous creatures from an unexplored cave system beneath the Superstition Mountains. King had been investigating the phenomenon when Sokoloff had made his move, and in so doing, had triggered a runaway antimatter reaction that had very nearly set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire.
Aleman clicked the mouse controller and brought up the website for something called the “Global Energy Future Meeting.”
“FLES-” he pronounced it fleas — “is currently hosting a conference for power plant managers from all over the world, ostensibly to discuss ways to upgrade the global power grid, so I was able to learn a lot about them, and in particular, I identified their chief executive officer. It’s someone you’ve met, King. Graham Brown.”
An image of Brown flashed up in King’s mind’s eye; an older, compact figure, reserved and outwardly unthreatening, but confident and enigmatic, as if aware that he held a secret advantage. With his extraordinary ability to calculate mathematical probabilities in his head, Brown had made a small fortune gambling in Atlantic City, and then turned that into a much larger fortune playing the stock market. He had known about the connection between Brainstorm and Brown almost from the beginning-Brown had been present at the remote facility in Algeria where he had first learned of Brainstorm-and there was every reason to believe that Brown had been responsible for creating the artificial intelligence in the first place.
But even as he stared at Aleman, waiting for the man to explain the importance of this connection, King understood. Brown hadn’t created…wasn’t working for an artificial intelligence called Brainstorm. “Brown is Brainstorm?”
A flicker of disappointment crossed Aleman’s countenance as King stole his thunder, but he nodded. “It’s like a magician using theatrics and distraction to hide the fact that it’s all just sleight of hand.”