The system pinged me in eight minutes, and that reminded me that MindReader Q1 was a quantum computer. It did not search or process like any other system on Earth. It was faster by orders of magnitude.
Several photos popped up on the screen, each tagged with source data. There were versions of the man with different haircuts and hair colors, varying degrees of tan, shifting eye color, and a variety of facial hair styles. But they were all the same man. MindReader kicked out seventeen aliases, but one name began showing up over and over again. I leaned close to study this man.
“Valen Oruraka,” I said. “Now who in the wide blue fuck are you?”
As if in answer, the system began chunking out data in bulk. The name was clearly phony, and even though this cat had used a number of false names, Valen Oruraka had become a kind of default personality. The first official record of it was prior to his enrollment at MIT for graduate work. When I checked for his undergraduate records, they all cracked open to reveal phony shit. Whoever had built the Oruraka personality had been pretty good at it, but they hadn’t counted on MindReader.
There was nothing before that, though. No facial recognition pics, no trace. That told me he was not American. Q1 can reverse-engineer photos to show us what adults might have looked like as kids, just as it can age pictures. There were no school photos in any database of that face, and he was young enough to have been in school when all such pictures were digitally archived.
So, I told the system to go wider, and there he was.
I made a call to Church, but couldn’t get through, so I called Bug, who answered. “Look at what I just sent you.”
“Got it,” said Bug, and began giving me the highlights. “Valen Oruraka, aka Oleg Sokolov. Born in Novosibirsk, Russia. Thirty-nine. Unmarried. No children. No living relatives. Parents died when he was young, lived for a while in Ukraine with his aunt and uncle and… wow.”
“Wow, what?”
“His uncle was Dr. Abram Golovin.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s dead, but he was the chief structural engineer at Chernobyl.”
“Hm. What else?”
“Went into the military and, bang, that’s it. Officially he died in a car crash on base. Buried in a family plot in Novosibirsk. Then he shows up in America under the name Valen Oruraka and enrolls in MIT and studied… oh, damn, Joe, you’re going to love this.”
“When you say that I never love it,” I said. “What did you find?”
“Joe, he studied seismology and geophysics.”
“Bingo,” I said, and pointed my finger like a gun at the face on my screen. “Bug, I need you to find this son of a bitch. Put as many people as you need on it. We know he was in D.C. today. My guess is that he’s taking his little God Machine and getting the hell out of Dodge. He knows I saw his face, so I don’t think he’ll be stupid enough to go through airport security. Find him anyway. You hear me? Find him.”
“Yeah,” said Bug. “Count on it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
The plane hadn’t logged very many miles before Bug was back on the line.
“You found him already?” I asked.
“No, no, you got to give me some time,” he said quickly. “But I got something else. Jerry Spencer and his team worked the crime scene where Sam was hurt. They’ve been scraping up pieces of the other biker, and they hit gold. Jerry found the man’s left hand and one intact eye.”
“Okay. Disgusting, but useful. Tell me what he got.”
“Jerry lifted fingerprints and also ran a recognition program off the retina. We got no joy on the prints, but the retina print got a hit. It was in a database of high rollers we, um, borrowed, from a casino in Dubai. The eye belonged to a Greek national named Aristotle Kostas.”
“Wait… I’ve heard that name somewhere. At least the Kostas name. Black market, maybe…?”
“Right. The Kostas family pretty much own the Mediterranean black market, and serious points in illegal trading in the Middle East and Africa. Guns, art, stuff supposedly destroyed by ISIL. He got on our radar as a possible person of interest when we started looking at the Turkish guy, Ohan, who was tied to Rafael Santoro’s search for the Unlearnable Truths.”
“Right. Kostas is the dead guy? How’s a power player like him tied to earthquakes in D.C.?”
“That’s the interesting part,” said Bug. “He went to MIT. Want to guess who his roommate was?”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Some of the images Q1 pulled of Oruraka were from street and hotel cameras in Greece. We can put those two together at like fifty different places in the U.S. and abroad.”
“This is great stuff, Bug. You’re a genius.”
“I am. It’s true,” he said.
“Put it all together and upload it to my computer. And call me the second you find Oruraka.”
“Will do.” And he was gone.
I poured myself another whiskey and felt a knot of tension in my chest ease by one small increment. We had names now. We had a major player who studied seismology and geophysics. We had ties to black marketers, though I didn’t yet know how that played into things. Maybe Ari Kostas was the guy who smuggled the God Machines into the country.
The fact that Kostas and Oruraka were both doing fieldwork on this was interesting. Either their group was so small that everyone had to get their hands dirty; or they were working for someone else. If so, who was upper management?
I was making inroads into my third glass of Irish whiskey when Church called.
“Glad to hear from you,” I said. “I have something to—”
“Captain, listen to me first,” he cut in, and the tone of his voice instantly chilled me to the bone. “I received a call from Lilith. She said that Violin has been injured while on a mission.”
“How bad?”
“She was shot and has suffered severe blood loss, shock, and internal bleeding. Her status is critical and trauma surgeons are working on her at a United Nations field hospital in Syria.”
“Who shot her?” I demanded. “I am going to fucking kill them.”
Church paused for a moment too long before he answered, and I knew that he was going to say something neither of us wanted to hear.
“It appears that Harry Bolt shot her.”
I nearly threw the expensive whiskey across the cabin. “Tell me.”
He did, about how Violin and her pet idiot had gone on a covert op in Syria. Both of them were fitted with RFID chips, but their signals had abruptly stopped minutes before an earthquake rocked the region.
“Whoa,” I said, “wait a minute. An earthquake?”
“Yes,” said Church.
“Another freaking earthquake? Oh, come on.”
“Yes. Two days ago. It was not particularly large and did no damage to any civilian population, which is why it did not make the news. Bear in mind, Captain, that there are thousands of earthquakes felt around the world. On average, fourteen hundred per year, which averages to about forty per day. Usually only those above magnitude six are reported, and of those, only the ones occurring in industrialized nations or near population centers. Earthquakes are not at all rare, but where they occur along the plate boundaries strongly influences whether anyone notices.”
“Thank you, Bill Nye.”
“This one, though, is suspicious because of the nature of Violin’s mission. She was tracking agents of the black marketer Ohan.”
“Ohan? That piece of shit?”
Ohan, a non-Muslim Turk, was one of the most effective and dangerous dealers in stolen technologies, weapons, and other items that “fell off a truck” in the Middle East. Because the CIA sometimes used him, Ohan’s designation was “hands off.” I had him on my personal list because he was involved in the Kill Switch case. His sideline was obtained items looted from libraries, tombs, sacred sites, and university museums in areas overrun by ISIL.