“I, uh, well—”
“You have a date tonight?”
“I was actually meeting, uh, a young lady,” stuttered Kharon.
“Naturally. Unfortunately, I’m going to Africa tomorrow. Wait.” Rubeo took out his wallet and retrieved a business card. It was a bit worn at the edges; he couldn’t remember the last time he actually gave one out.
“Here,” he told Kharon, handing him the card. “You are to send me an e-mail. Or call that number at the bottom. Call as soon as you get back to your room tonight. There’ll be a secretary. Make an appointment.”
Kharon took the card.
“The secretary may be a computer,” added Rubeo. “Or maybe not. See if it passes the Turing Test.”
Kharon shoved the card in his pocket and walked toward the lounge. His cheeks were burning; he felt unbalanced, small and weak. It was as if he was trapped again, back in the closet.
He went to the bar and ordered a beer. He took it from the bartender’s hand and practically drained it, still feeling pressed in on all sides.
Undone by a chance meeting? What kind of coward are you?
What kind of sissy weakling are you?
You should have shot him dead right there. Killed the bodyguard, too.
He hadn’t brought his gun. That was just one of his many mistakes.
“Are you all right?” asked the bartender in Italian.
“Bene, bene.” Kharon raised his head and looked at the bartender. Then he glanced at the bottle — it was nearly empty. “Un altro, per favore,” he said stiffly. “Please. Another.”
The bartender smiled. “A woman, eh?”
“Yes. My mother.”
“Ahhh,” said the bartender knowingly. He went and got the beer. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said, placing the bottle on the counter.
In a way, the man had drawn exactly the right conclusions, Kharon thought. He was still grieving.
Upstairs, Rubeo left Levon Jons and went into his room, checking the security first with his bug detector. The device mapped the room’s electrical circuitry, and was sensitive enough to detect even the NSA’s latest generation of nanopowered “flies”—a certification Rubeo was sure of since his company had worked on the technology employed in the microsized listening gear.
The room was clean. Rubeo sat down in the large chair opposite the television and turned the set on, flipping to the U.S. news stations.
Alissa Kharon’s son working for VGNet. Good God!
The news program detailed a shake-up in the Libyan government’s ruling body. A group of alleged moderates had taken over.
Since when did moderates take anything over? Rubeo wondered.
He changed the channel. CNN was carrying a discussion program. The host introduced a speech from a member of the Iranian government saying the American plane that had bombed the village was the spawn of the devil.
“I’m sure you’re an expert on that,” spat Rubeo.
He sat back on the bed, mind drifting. He thought of Alissa Kharon. He’d had a crush on her. She probably didn’t even know. He’d certainly never acted on it: She was married and, though he was her supervisor, a few years older than he was.
Pretty woman. And very smart.
He closed his eyes and heard the alarms, smelled the fire, the aftermath. Alissa had died from suffocation in the lab bunker. The laser system she was working on had malfunctioned, and rather than leaving, she’d tried to put out the fire — a classic mistake, but like her in a way, insisting that she could shut down the systems and prevent more damage.
Rubeo knew exactly what she must have thought — all that work they’d done about to be ruined. The laser was connected to a hand-built targeting system that the team had spent two years perfecting. She had jumped from her station and run to it as the others began to leave.
The bunker had been equipped with a state-of-the-art fire suppression system. But state of the art in the early 1990s wasn’t quite good enough to kill the chemical fire the laser unit spawned. The doors locked, and for some reason no one realized that she was still inside.
Rubeo, working upstairs on something else, distracted as he always was then, arrived to find one of her assistants screaming frantically.
“Where’s Alissa?” she’d yelled. “Where’s Alissa?”
He overrode the system, but when they opened the doors they were met with a wall of black smoke. He had to close the doors — he closed them himself, knowing she was already dead, lost somewhere behind the smoke.
The hazmat team arrived a few seconds later. Rubeo went and got himself a suit, and went in after them.
Her body, badly burned, was back near the unit. The main AI unit lay inches from her outstretched hand.
She was a beautiful woman, and smart, with a kid and a husband. The husband dissolved after her death. He died of cancer a year later, but he’d been a broken man, unable to pull himself back together.
By then the assistant who had screamed had committed suicide.
Not because of Alissa’s death, or so the investigators said — she had marital problems, which were prominently mentioned in the note she left. But Rubeo remembered the last line of the suicide note:
I will see Alissa for you all.
So much pain. So much success and achievements, and all he could think of was the pain.
Rubeo glanced at the television. The talking heads were pontificating about the dangers of drones and the inevitability of “disasters.”
“What about the decline in collateral damage brought on by smart weapons?” Rubeo asked the screen. “What about the ability to empirically correct problems in the machines, unlike intractable human error?”
He flipped the television off.
What sort of thing did VGNet want young Kharon to do for them? His graduate work, if Rubeo recalled correctly, had to do with systems integration relating to intelligence.
Or was he wrong?
He’d look it up in the morning. And check on VGNet — they had a lab in southern Italy, obviously, but where?
He really should pay more attention to his competitors and potential competitors. Now, though, he needed sleep. He had to leave for the airport at four, and it was already past one.
Two and a half hours of sleep. About his norm when traveling. Rubeo pulled off his clothes and climbed into bed.
12
Zen sat in the secure communications room, sipping his coffee and thinking about his daughter, Teri. More than anything in the world, he wanted to talk to her about baseball, one of their morning routines.
An odd thing. A decade and a half ago, back at Dreamland, he never would have thought he would have preferred speaking to his little girl rather than the President of the United States.
“I’m sorry for the interruption, Zen,” said the President, coming back to the video screen. “Some days the schedule just gets ahead of itself.”
“I understand, Madam President.”
“I think there’s no downside in proceeding,” said National Security Advisor Michael Blitz, who was sitting next to her in the secure communications center in the White House basement. “At least at this point. Naturally, down the road, it could all blow up in our face.”
“I don’t like the idea of nonprofessionals conducting these sorts of talks.” Alistair Newhaven, the Secretary of State, shook his head as if he’d just come out of a pool and was getting rid of excess water. Zen didn’t know Newhaven very well, and what he did know of him he didn’t like. “This is a very sensitive and dangerous area.”