“Shut it off!” Smith shouted, dropping to his knees beside the man.
“I can’t. Once it’s triggered, it runs off the internal battery.”
Randi devised a typically inelegant but effective solution — grabbing a wrench and attacking the individual parts of the Merge on the table.
Smith ignored the men guarding them and felt Whitfield’s neck for a pulse. Nothing. Based on everything Smith knew about the Merge technology, it was impossible. But impossible or not, the man was dead.
65
Christian Dresner sat watching a massive computer monitor on the wall. It was an irritatingly archaic technology, but transmitting a feed from someone else’s Merge directly to the mind of another had turned out to be problematic. The complexities were slowly being ironed out but for now it did little more than create confusion as the brain struggled to differentiate its own experiences from the experiences of the person at the other end of the connection.
The image of Jon Smith performing CPR on Whitfield was coming in real time from Deuce Brennan and Dresner leaned forward, watching carefully. Russell was looking around, undoubtedly for a weapon, but her expression suggested she knew she’d be dead before she could use it. Zellerbach — a man whose genius he’d managed to completely overlook — was panicking, knocking things off his desk and tripping over them as he backed away.
The sweat was hot and slick in his palms, but Dresner forced himself to remain calm. While the discovery of his subsystem so soon was a potential disaster, it appeared that control could be regained. In fact, he might one day look back at this moment as the day his mounting problems were resolved.
Dresner glanced at an icon hovering in his peripheral vision but instead of activating it, he stood and walked closer to the monitor. He’d experimented extensively with the effect of shutting down his subsystem after four seconds in order to simulate the experience of headsets being knocked off. The survival rate was twelve percent with no intervention and forty-nine percent with immediately administered CPR.
With implants and the full eighteen-second cycle, though, fatalities were nearly one hundred percent, even with medical intervention. Whitfield’s situation — a shutdown halfway through the cycle — was something he hadn’t considered. Could he be revived?
“You told me this couldn’t hurt anyone,” Randi Russell said over the speakers. “That even with a full battery discharge, it would only give you a little shock.”
“It can’t,” Smith responded, sounding understandably perplexed as he continued to hammer the motionless man’s chest. “I don’t understand it. There’s just not enough power.”
While extremely intelligent — perhaps even borderline brilliant — Smith’s thinking was too linear. A common failing of men who spent their lives in the confines of the military.
Dresner’s curiosity was satisfied a moment later when Whitfield’s eyes opened and he grabbed Smith’s arm. Similar to the Koreans who were brought back, he seemed to suffer few ill effects. Not surprising. There had been nothing wrong with his heart.
Smith helped him to his feet and he managed to stand on his own, blinking at the people around him for a moment before speaking. “What happened?”
“It looks like it stopped your heart,” Smith said.
Whitfield remained silent for a moment, but when he spoke again he had shaken off his confusion. “Deuce. Give the colonel back his phone. Jon, use it to tell your people what happened. We need to call a meeting with the president and the Joint Chiefs.”
It was precisely what Dresner had wanted to hear. The implication was clear: All the people who knew of Zellerbach’s discovery were in that room. What had been a potentially insurmountable problem now looked like a permanent solution.
There would be questions about their deaths, of course, but it was hard to imagine that they would lead to the rediscovery of his subsystem — particularly with the further precautions he intended to put in place. Once again, Castilla would want this to simply go away. To propagate his own power and the power of his country.
“Lieutenant. Did you hear me? Give Smith his phone back,” Whitfield said.
So arrogant. So foolish to believe that he was in command.
Dresner activated an icon in his peripheral vision, opening a direct link to Deuce Brennan’s Merge. “I think it’s time we took control of this situation, Lieutenant.”
66
By the time Smith had helped a shaky James Whitfield to his feet, both of the men guarding them had lowered their weapons. The red-haired one Randi had called Deuce reached toward his chest pocket — to retrieve the phone he’d been ordered to return, Smith assumed — but instead shot the man next to him in the side.
Smith froze at the quiet crack of the silenced pistol, unable to immediately process what had just happened. Randi was quicker and she lunged toward him with the wrench still in her hand.
“Not today, Randi,” he said, swinging the pistol in her direction before she even got close. “Now back off, bitch.”
She did as she was told, dropping the wrench while he followed her with his weapon, eyes sweeping smoothly around the room. Randi’s deference appeared to be well founded. He was fast as hell and apparently completely unaffected by the fact that he’d just gunned down his teammate in cold blood. Not a man to roll the dice with.
“Lieutenant…” Whitfield said, not yet fully recovered from being dead a few moments before. “What are you doing? You’re a soldier. You—”
“No sir. The day I went to work for you, I left my oath of loyalty behind. I became a mercenary.”
Whitfield continued to gain strength. “What the hell are you talking about? We do what we do to protect our country. To save the lives of the people you work with. How is that a mercenary?”
“Yeah, maybe I’m just rationalizing,” he said, adjusting his aim to Whitfield. “And if Dresner had offered me a couple hundred grand, I’d have probably told him to screw off and reported it to you five minutes later. But he doesn’t work in those kinds of numbers. So, while I regret having to kill all of you — and I really do — it might make you feel better to know I’m getting Learjet- and private-island-money to do it.”
The quiet crack sounded again and Whitfield crumpled to the floor. This time, though, he wouldn’t be getting back up.
Smith looked down at the bleeding hole in the man’s chest, blinking hard as his focus seemed to waver. When he turned back toward Deuce, the gun was moving back to Randi, creating a colorful trail through the air that looked a little like a rainbow. Randi went for the soldier again, refusing to go down without a fight, but tripped over her own feet and sprawled on the floor.
“Jon! Wake up now. Come on. Jon!”
Smith opened his eyes slowly, seeing nothing but a halo of light around something hovering over him. The image began to sharpen and he finally recognized it as Marty wearing a respirator with “Home Depot” stenciled on the side.
“What…What happened?” Smith said, the muffled sound of his voice suggesting that he was wearing a similar mask, which his numb face didn’t register.
“The house’s defenses don’t end at my front door.”
Smith managed to prop himself up on his elbows and Zellerbach grabbed him under the arm, dragging him to his feet. Once he’d regained enough balance to stand on his own, he looked over at Randi, who was lying partially on top of Deuce. No blood in evidence.