“I will,” he assured her. “But tell me, Zephyr my sweet, is this what you truly want? There is no coming back from this. If this fire is lit, it will rage out of control almost at once.”
The car made a turn onto a lovely street lined with graceful Mexican fan palm trees. There was no wind, and they looked painted against the blue sky.
“Then let it burn,” she said fiercely. “Please, John, let’s burn it all down.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
We took showers at Violin’s hotel. Separate showers, which was different from the way we’d cleaned up after some past assignments. There is a strange politeness that comes over people who were once lovers and now found themselves in a confined space doing ordinary things. Eyes were averted most of the time, there was a lot of courtesy, a lot of “please” and “thank you.” Like that. Except every once in a while we’d both become aware of it and exchange a look, a smile, a brief laugh.
When it was her turn in the bathroom, I sat down with a MindReader substation laptop and uploaded every bit of data I’d found on flash drives and CDs. There was a lot of it. And I had to hand-scan some papers. The MindReader uplink fritzed out on me twice, and I had to reboot to get it to send. After that everything ran smoothly, and Bug’s team was ready to receive it, triage it, and forward it along to different experts within our extended DMS family.
Some of the data was forwarded to Dr. Acharya, a celebrated specialist in biomechanical technologies. Acharya was not yet an official part of the DMS, but he was one of several multidisciplinary brainiacs being considered to replace Hu.
I was deeply conflicted about Hu’s death, because he had been far from my favorite human being, and it’s fair to say that I liked him a lot less than some of the bad guys I’ve shot, stabbed, and run over. He was a class-A dickhead… but he was our dickhead. Hu was beyond brilliant, and his conceptual understanding of cutting-edge science kept the DMS way out front. Since his death we’d worked with a number of experts, but we hadn’t yet found anyone who could fill Hu’s shoes. Never really thought I’d miss the little bastard.
“Can we get Acharya on the phone?” I asked.
“Sorry, no can do,” Bug told me. “He’s out in Washington State at this big super hush-hush DARPA event. He’s consulting with all the top experts on military applications of nanotech and robotics. They have this incredible security protocol in place for the whole camp. No phones of any kind, no Wi-Fi, no personal laptops, nothing. All communication requests have to go through the White House. How crazy is that?”
“Well, this is moderately important, Bug. I mean… nanotech and chemical slavery?”
“You know that and I know that, Joe,” said Bug, “but it’s not happening on U.S. soil or in any of our current spheres of influence. The new president’s still unpacking, and the Department of Defense is nearly as wrecked as we are. Ever since Kill Switch, the levels of security around things like the DARPA camp have gotten to the point that even a four-star general has to get permission in triplicate and countersigned by the Joint Chiefs to send an email to his own mother. It’s nuts, and it’s the kind of overreaction that creates a lot more problems than it solves. Besides, it’s being run by Major Schellinger — and you know what she’s like.”
I sighed. Major Carly Schellinger was nominally U.S. Army but actually on the payroll of the CIA. She oversaw a lot of the most highly classified field testing of advanced technologies and was known for being humorless, unapproachable, unkind, and inflexible. Schellinger also swung an extraordinary amount of political weight, and I’d seen generals defer to her. To be fair, she has overseen most of the practical applications of advanced technology in the past ten years, including the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, which has the capacity to emanate a 10-kilowatt missile-killing energy laser from a mobile vehicle; SWARM, a deadly flock of coordinated roach-size explosive microdrones; combat autonomous-drive systems for mobile robot gun emplacements; and the electromagnetic railgun, which has a muzzle velocity of Mach 7.5 and a range of a hundred and twenty-four miles. She gets the geek squads and the think tanks to perform at max output and then drives development through prototype variations to field-ready rollouts in record time. She’s also old money, and her family has been interbreeding with most of the other old-money defense contractors since someone filed the patent on the first bow and arrow. A battle-scarred old full-bird colonel once told me that he would rather try to pass a live porcupine through his own colon than try to get Major Schellinger to deviate from her personally orchestrated security protocols.
“Well… call her,” I told Bug lamely. “Use your charm and nerdish good looks.”
“She’s Satan in the flesh.”
“Try and sweet-talk her. Oh, hey, while I have you,” I said, “I’ve been having all kinds of problems with MindReader lately. The upload gizmo was funky, and it took me forever to log into the network tonight. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Everyone’s bitching at me about that today.”
“Violin says that MindReader’s getting old and senile.”
“She can bite me.”
“Be nice,” I said, but he hung up on me.
I ordered food from room service and trolled through the data while I waited. It was some pretty horrific stuff. If I was feeling any lingering guilt about the lives we’d ended, it melted away as I read. Not only had someone found the science we thought had been destroyed; they’d upped the game. The nanites that had been introduced into the game worked like microscopic processing plants to manipulate the brain chemistry of every slave worker, making them dependent on new doses. If they ever escaped and tried to get clean, the nanites would then migrate into the brain and attack the pain receptors. The victims would be plunged into a world of mind-rending agony from which there was no possible escape short of being caught in an electromagnetic pulse. They would very likely be driven insane and probably kill themselves to stop the pain.
It was horrible. This was twenty-first-century science. I wanted to believe that when we torched that lab we wiped out the entire organization. Yeah, I wanted to believe that.
But I’m just not that naïve.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The man parked the truck as close to the plaza as he could get. He opened the door but didn’t get out. Instead, he lit a cigarette and watched the madness.
The crowd had been building for days and was now pushing three hundred thousand. The noise from fifty different bands and all those happy voices created a joyful thunder that covered the entire town like a cloud. Some of the bands were on stages, but most were strolling musicians in little groups of two or three or four. The revelers were adorned with bright-colored embroidery and beadwork, with jewelry and extravagant hats. The man had no idea what holiday this was, and didn’t much care. It was fun to watch.
A small pack of laughing children ran past, chasing one another, dodging and ducking out of reach in an improvised game of tag whose rules seemed to change depending on who was “it.” The kids were dressed in old clothes that showed signs of use and had been patched and repaired many times. One boy had expensive American-made basketball sneakers, but they were ancient and patched with ragged strips of silver duct tape. The kids were skinny and dirty, but they were all happy in the moment, caught up in the immediacy of their game.