“I got it,” I tell him softly.
“The plates?”
“Yes.” I still don’t pull forward. The pickup is heading toward the highway.
Xavier and I have known each other for a long time, and now when he speaks he reads my mind. “You’re thinking about Charlene this time, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. And what you said earlier, about her wanting to be important enough to make me think twice.”
“To look before you leap.”
“Exactly.”
The pickup is gone.
I take a small breath. “And right now I’m looking.”
“I’m proud of you, bro. You’re teachable after all.”
“Don’t be too proud.” I glide my fingers across the DB9’s console. “I kinda leaped first. At least a little.”
“I won’t mention it.” He has his phone poised in his hand. “So you got the plate number?”
I recite it to him but then hesitate. “I’m not great with make and model, though, so—” A woman putting on lipstick and driving a minivan pulls up behind me and lays on her horn. I roll around the corner and continue up the block. “It was a newish-looking white pickup, that’s about all I know.”
“It was a 2012 Chevy Silverado.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
I look at him quizzically. “That’s pretty specific. I’ve never known you to be a car geek.”
“I’m not. But I know that vehicle all too well.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s what the Cammo dudes drive out at Groom Lake — um, a private security firm. They guard the perimeter. I mean, sometimes they help with stuff on the base, resupplies, that sort of thing, but — well, that’s what we call ’em. The dudes wear camouflage pants, sometimes they’re called cami dudes instead.”
“I get it.”
“Anyway, remember when I mentioned just now that I was in car chases?”
“Yes. You never told me what side of the chases you were on.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But 2012 wasn’t before my time.”
“Neither were all the car chases.”
“I see.” I turn the car around.
The Groom Lake connection might be legit, but I’m not sure where that leaves us right now.
“So,” I ask him, “you think it was a Cammo dude?”
“There’s no way to tell for sure, but it would fit that whoever he was, he’s at least with the same security firm.”
“Well, for right now, we saw a male Caucasian fleeing the scene, we have the make, model, year, and plates of the vehicle. That gives us plenty to tell the cops. But you don’t necessarily have to tell them that we were just in a high-speed chase with the suspect.”
“Right on.” He pulls out his phone again.
I aim the DB9 toward the next intersection, then turn left. “Why don’t you call Fionna too, see what she can pull up on the plates.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to his house. I want to have another look around before the cops get there.”
“It’s a crime scene, we might leave DNA behind on the — wait. We already left DNA behind.”
“Precisely. So what do we have to lose?”
“But Jev, that place was a mess. How’ll you be able to tell what the guy was after?”
“I have a feeling I already know what he was after.”
“What’s that?”
“The USB drive.”
A slight pause. “Gotcha.”
He calls 911 and then phones Fionna while I guide the Aston Martin back toward Emilio’s house.
Colonel Byrne parked in the short-term lot at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport.
After his forty-two-minute flight to Phoenix, he would be picked up by the associates of the person who came up with the idea for tomorrow night’s transfer of merchandise. Perhaps he would be able to find out, at last, his — or her — true identity.
From the car’s trunk, he retrieved the hard-cased suitcase containing the robotic arm and rolled it behind him as he headed for the terminal.
Harsh Mercy
Heston Dembski, RN, special assistant to Dr. Malhotra, had a problem.
He knew what was going on in the lower levels of Plyotech’s R&D facility, and he was not sure what to do about it. He knew about the primate research, the gene therapy programs, the xenotransplantation initiatives, the neural implants. He had his theories about why things were taken care of in the way they were, but he couldn’t be certain.
It was not his job to ask questions.
It was his job to assist Dr. Malhotra.
To do as he was told.
He’d just been transferred down here to work with the team two weeks ago. The prescreenings, background checks, and psych evals had all been intensive. At least two dozen other applicants who’d been interviewing with Heston hadn’t made it. And so, he’d felt genuinely honored to get the job.
However, almost right away he was faced with a seemingly insurmountable ethical dilemma — assist with something you don’t believe in to accomplish something you do, or betray those you work for just to calm your conscience.
From the start he’d felt a little uncomfortable with what they were doing but had tried to convince himself that it was all in the name of science, that the things he was seeing, the research he was finding himself a part of, were for the greater good. That it was necessary.
But then he came across the tests they were doing on patient 175-4, a man who Heston found out, through his own research, was named Thad Becker and had first volunteered for the program about forty days ago. Apparently, he’d come in as a quadriplegic and was outfitted with the experimental exolimbs, but had not been able to learn to use them yet.
And then, according to the charts, he’d slipped into a coma.
That’s what Heston had been told, but that’s not what he believed. No, if he was right, a coma, even death, would have been a better fate for Mr. Becker; Heston had no doubt about that.
This morning they were scheduled to do a brain scan on Thad in the specially designed fMRI machine, the one made for incapacitated patients.
Heston passed down the hallway to meet up with Calista Hendrix at the elevator bay.
He wasn’t sure why she was granted access privileges that almost no one else was, but when she was around no one questioned it.
Throughout the rest of the facility, work was being done on reverse engineering the human brain to create smart machines and computers with strong AI, but down here the research focused mainly on direct machine-to-brain interfaces.
All of it was paving the way to using nanotechnology — that is, bioengineering at the molecular level — to scan the human brain and develop more advanced ways of interfacing humans with machines through electrode implants and, eventually, through implanted neural nanobots themselves.
Nanotechnology, bioengineering, and robotics were the three fields that held the most promise to help humans make the next great evolutionary leap — away from the limits of biological intelligence and cellular senescence and toward their destiny of technological immortality.
First, of course, it was essential to create a machine capable of not just recording information or processing at the computational level of the human brain, but also of capturing the essence of personality, dreams, aspirations, memory. In other words, consciousness — which science has shown must simply be an outgrowth of the complexity of an interplay of neural synapses.