He checked his watch again: a blink-and-miss-it ninety seconds had passed. Carefully planned, expertly executed. He shook his head in wonderment; there literally was no substitute for getting the right people for the job.
And in that time, on the left hand side of the screen, Dr Richardson had panned the remotely operated camera from left to right and then back again, half a dozen times. Her posture remained unchanged, and she was still fidgeting with her hair.
While hope remained that a solution to the Mars problem would be found, his instincts told him that Dr Richardson, regardless of whether they found the other crew members alive or not, would not fully recover from this ordeal, and replacing her with a simulation was simply out of the question.
Cityscapes indistinguishable from the real thing, busy playgrounds, even Martian exploration; you could fake them all and no one would suspect a thing. But there was no substitute for genuine human behaviour. A real human could tell a fake human’s face. Oh, there was no doubt you could play a trick for a while: advanced textures, hair, lighting effects, frame-perfect animation, cartilage-elasticity algorithms and detailed muscular modelling could all come together to create a truly believable person.
But eventually, and unavoidably, the truth would be apparent to the human eye. The news reader was a case in point. She was attractive, had girlish combed-back hair in a cute little ponytail, a nice smile, a couple of freckles here and there, and even had a cheeky little personality. Take a still photo and you could make someone believe she was real. But you only needed to watch one newsfeed to recognise that she wasn’t the product of a fruitful human relationship, but rather the output of a skilled development team, the illusion broken by the one thing that cannot be programmed: Life.
This to Seth Mallus, at this very moment, was the crux of the whole matter. The paradox with which he had battled internally since the Book of Xynutians had first been presented to him.
How can the propagation of intelligent life, the success of a species, be met with annihilation? How can an advanced species such as the Xynutians be wiped clear from the face of the planet with little or no trace?
The philosopher inside him told him that this was not a paradox. The logical culmination of all life is eventual death. But the logic inside him disagreed. While death was a certainty for some, why should this affect the species as a whole, and not simply the individuals concerned?
He had eventually drawn his conclusions based purely on gut feeling. The action plan he had devised had been put into place almost immediately. There had been no public debate. His position afforded him such executive luxuries, while the lavish defence budgets put forward by the United States government over successive years had been easily diverted to fund the plan. No one had ever sought to question expenditure on a line-item basis, and many of the initiatives had cost relatively little, being simple divergence from original, legitimate projects, the truth of which was divulged to a select, well paid few.
And after years of careful planning and research, tonight he had reached a crossroads, although it vexed him slightly that his hand was being forced. The timing wasn’t of his choosing, and he would have enjoyed more freedom to study the Mars findings more.
Of course, there was still a chance that Dr Patterson would make a discovery, that the crew on Mars would be recovered safe and sound, and that the elaborate charade could once again resume. The ‘alien findings’ would gladly be accepted as impressive hoaxes, the ‘issues’ communicating with the Mars team put down to computer viruses initiated by the hoaxsters. The whole debacle would be given a suitably inflammatory ‘cyber-terrorism’ headline in the daily news, and undoubtedly a government agency previously unknown to the general public would suddenly receive billions of dollars of funding to combat this terrifying threat.
But just one look at Dr Richardson, alone in her little world on Mars, told him differently.
He was at a crossroads.
To the left, unfortunately made inaccessible by a big red ‘No Entry’ sign, the Mars team turn up safe and sound and everything goes back to normal.
Carry straight on, and DEFCOMM is investigated for its part in the biggest cover-up in history. He is arrested on suspicion of murdering a member of the Clarke’s crew and the head of a museum in Cairo, and also for abducting a respected British scientist and faking her death, in doing so making it abundantly clear that he had no intention of ever letting her go. Not to mention the lesser charge of misappropriating millions of dollars for personal research, and misusing government-owned equipment and defence systems, for which treason and piracy would probably be mentioned. He would be tried in Florida, where there would be no avoiding a certain death penalty.
Of course, he had always known this to be the case. All of the risks he had taken had been well calculated and very deliberate, which is why he still had one more direction to take.
A ninety-degree turn to the right. The answer to Aniquilus’ Paradox was not that life resulted in death, but that death allowed life. Just as modern Man had benefitted from the demise of the Xynutians before them.
Am I Aniquilus? he mused.
With the vans safely on their way to despatching their deadly cargos, he turned his attention to Dr Patterson’s expedition to Egypt, the final hope for plan A, before plan B was executed. It was due diligence, he told himself, to give them a fair shot.
He barked a command and the final quarter of the screen lit up: a satellite view of a barren, desert scene. Seven hours ahead of his current time-zone, it was mid-afternoon, and by the dark shadows moving along the rock and sand he could make out a trio of all-terrain vehicles labouring their way along what could barely be called a dirt track. Their target lay a few hundred yards away, round a couple more bends and through a gap in a small ridge: a small plateau, in the middle of which stood a small building.
It was a live-satellite feed from above Egypt, one of the perks of distributing hardware and software for United States defence satellites, and the display was grid marked for easy referencing.
“Full screen,” he snapped. As the image filled the window, he caught a glimpse of movement along the narrow gap in the ridge, through which the small convoy would shortly be passing.
“Magnify C7,” followed by “Magnify range D3 to F6.”
Now filling the screen was a man in khaki cargo pants and a short sleeved shirt. Held across his knees was the unmistakable form of an AK-47. He zoomed the display back one level, and panned across the gap to the other side of the ridge. Within seconds he had located two further men with guns. While these were far better hidden than the first, they clearly hadn’t been expecting to be seen from above.
Seth Mallus shook his head slowly before picking up the phone and calling Walker.
Chapter 67
George shifted uneasily between the two rocks he hoped offered him cover from the track below. He was uncomfortable, primarily because of the unfamiliar AK-47 laid across his knees and the approaching 4x4s he imagined were full of men with guns, but also because no matter how hard he tried there always seemed to be a sharp rock nestled somewhere it shouldn’t be.
To make matters worse, his nerves were making his stomach churn more than any fairground ride he had been on.
He raised his head over the boulder and sneaked a peak across to the other side of the gulley. Although he knew more or less where Haji and Manu had taken up their positions, he couldn’t see them at all. Certainly anyone approaching from below wouldn’t stand a chance.