Kingmaker (30 page)

But it was not in any of these men’s eyes that Alexei found the hint of sympathy and humanity. It was in the cool, slate-blue eyes of the man who later came to take Alexei away; who told him that his parents were gone and that they were not coming back; who reassured the boy that he had done the right thing, and that as long as he was faithful to his country, he would always be taken care of.

Alexei opens his eyes. “Florian,” he whispers to the commander. He swallows and tries to clear his throat. “It was Florian, wasn’t it?”

He believes he now sees just a hint of genuine regret in the commander’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” the man says, then fires a single shot directly through the spot where Alexei’s heart once was.

Andre is awakened by the shrill clamor of multiple bolts sliding inside the thick metal door of his cell. The sound reverberates throughout the concrete enclosure and then settles into a silence that buzzes and rings in the boy’s ears. There is the groan of heavy hinges as the door is pushed open, but it is not until he hears the unmistakable clank and shuffle of another prisoner’s timid gait that he is curious enough to open his good eye. The other eye is swollen and infected and glued shut with dry yellow puss.

The other prisoner in his cell is a young Asian girl. Her hands and feet are bound by heavy chains and she is wearing the same paper-thin orange clothing that he is, though hers is in much better condition. She looks more intrigued than frightened as she inspects the room, though her expression changes when her eyes finally find the boy curled up in the corner. She moves urgently to his side and kneels, her chains rattling as they gather on the concrete floor beneath her.

The girl’s head is cocked to the side as she reaches for Andre’s face. She is startled when the boy slaps her hand away and pushes himself up against the wall.

“Who the
fuck
are you?” he spits out.

“It’s OK,” the girl tells him. “It’s me. It’s Ki. From the compound.”

She watches him while he internalizes what is happening and what he is seeing—while he tries to reconcile the two worlds which have just been unexpectedly thrust together. Although the compound is almost all he has talked about since he’s been here, it has somehow become distant
and abstract like a book he can’t quite remember reading, or a dream he struggles to recall the next morning. But the girl in front of him is real. She is not a trick. Her presence is proof that he once had a life before all of this; that something good had once existed; that there was a time when he knew what it was like to not always be afraid.

Andre can see in the girl’s face how he looks to her, and he realizes what the stench inside his cell must be like. He is embarrassed and ashamed, and there is a part of him that wants to scream at her to get out, but another part of him wants to reach out and grasp her, and pull her to him, to hold on to her forever.

“Ki,” the boy finally says. His voice is weak and dry.

The girl nods and gives him a sympathetic smile. “It’s OK, Andre. Everything is going to be OK.”

“I need to know.”

“Know what?”

The boy clears his throat and forces himself to swallow. “Was it real?”

“Was what real, Dre?”

“What I did on the
Megalodon
. What happened in Sierra Leone. Was it all real?”

“Yes,” the girl tells him. “It was real, Dre. All of it was real.”

“Did it work?” the boy wants to know. “Are they free?”

The girl watches him but does not answer. Gradually, Andre begins to understand the meaning of her silence. He looks away.

“Then it was all for nothing, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Ki assures him. She touches his arm and this time the boy does not pull away. “They
were
free. And they will be free again. You gave them everything they need to keep fighting. You inspired them, Andre. You gave them
hope
.”

The boy lies back down on his mat. “I shouldn’t have done it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have done any of it. I should’ve just stayed in Baltimore.” When the girl does not answer, he looks up at her. “Do you regret what you did?”

“No,” Ki says. “I don’t regret anything. Not for a second. No matter how all of this turns out, I will never regret anything that I’ve done.”

“Did he make you do it?”

“Of course not,” Ki says. There is a touch of sensitivity in her tone. “You know he wouldn’t do that.”

“That’s not what I mean,” the boy says. “I mean did you do it for yourself, or did you do it for him?”

The girl thinks about the question. “I don’t know,” she finally says. She leans to the side and transitions from kneeling to sitting Indian style. She gathers the chains in her lap. “Sometimes I can’t tell where my thoughts end and his begin.”

“I still can’t figure out if I did it for him or for me,” the boy says. “I still don’t really even understand what happened. It’s like I was someone else—like all I could do was stand there and watch myself do it. I knew I was going to end up in someplace like this, but just for those few seconds, I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything but taking the shot.”

“You know what I think?” the girl says. “I don’t think you did it for Alexei or for yourself. I think you did it for the people. And in the end, I think that’s all that matters.”

The boy nods. He watches the girl. The thick chains that bind her hands and feet are disproportionate to her slight frame.

“What happened?” he asks her. “Why are you here?”

“We’re all here,” she says. “They raided the compound.”

The boy watches Ki for a moment longer before he asks his next question. “It was my fault, wasn’t it?”

“
No
,” the girl tells him emphatically. “Absolutely not. Alexei was betrayed by someone named Florian Lasker. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”

The boy shakes his head. “See, that’s what I still don’t get,” he says.

“What?”

“How do you know when to take the shot and when to walk away?”

The girl shrugs. “I wish I knew.”

“I mean, it’s like there’s just too many variables—too much you can’t know. There’s no way to predict how things are going to turn out until they just happen. It’s like it’s all random.”

“I don’t know,” the girl says. “If Alexei were here, I suppose he’d tell us that you can’t know—that you just do what you can, when you can, and hope for the best.”

The boy looks around them. “This ain’t exactly the best,” he says.

“No,” the girl agrees. “Not exactly.”

The boy pushes himself back up and leans against the wall.

“How long have I been here?”

Ki hesitates. “You don’t know?”

Andre shakes his head. “At least a month. Maybe two.”

“Andre,” the girl says, “you’ve been here over six months.”

“No,” the boys says. He looks confused.

“My God, Andre, what have they done to you?”

The boy closes his eye. He is still and silent for a time, and then his body quivers with weak sobs, though he is unable to produce tears.

“I want to go home,” the boy says. “I want to go home.”

“Dre, you need to know that Alexei did everything he could for you. He did everything in his power to try to find you.”

The boy shakes his head. “That’s bullshit,” he says. “I’m just collateral damage to him.”

“You are
not
collateral damage,” the girl insists. “He told me that himself. He said that if he knew where you were, he would come in here and kill every last one of these motherfuckers himself to get you out. He said he would die before he left you in here one second longer than he had to. Do you understand me, Andre? Alexei did
not
abandon you.”

The boy opens his eye and looks at Ki, then looks away. As dehydrated as he is, he has managed to shed a single tear which leaves a dark trail on his dry skin. He reaches up and wipes it away with the back of his hand.

“We shouldn’t be talking about him,” the boy says.

“Why not?”

“It’s what they want. It’s why they let you in here.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re listening.” He looks up at one of the cameras in the corner. “They’re hoping we’ll say something that will help them find Alexei. He’s all they care about.”

The girl does not respond. Andre studies her expression.

“What?”

The girl looks down and her dark eyes fill with tears.

“He wasn’t at the compound, was he?” the boy says. “He knew they were coming, right?”

Ki shakes her head.

“What happened?”

“They killed him,” the girl says. “During the raid. They shot him right in front of the children.”

The boy’s eye searches the concrete floor, then finds the girl once again. “Then it really was all for nothing,” he says. He leans over and lies back down on his mat. “It really is over, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” the girl says. She blinks and tears drop into the pile of chains in her lap. “Maybe it is.”

The polls will open in less than twenty-four hours. Even though noncorporate voter turnout isn’t expected to top five percent, polling locations are still required to open on time and to remain open throughout the day. The majority of what has become known as the “walk-in” vote will likely go to Lucas Constantine—a self-proclaimed technocrat who, through a futile but symbolically defiant grassroots effort, managed to get added to the ballot in all fifty states. The funding for Constantine’s ongoing campaign comes from discreet private investors who go to extraordinary lengths to see that the trail of money does not lead back to them, and the labor comes from a group of radical dissidents who have pledged to succumb to starvation on the streets, or to freeze to death on sidewalks where commuters will have to step over their corpses, or to perish in grand displays of self-immolation in public squares before desecrating the democratic ideal by surrendering what they believe is their God-given right to cast a vote and to choose their own leaders.

Florian Lasker is currently in an undisclosed location, as is President Klein, Vice President Scholfield, and the entire Pearl Knight board of directors. Their locations will remain secret—even to each other—until all the votes are in, a winner is declared, and comprehensive independent security assessments by the Secret Service, Department of Homeland
Security, and the NSA have all concluded that the citizen threat level has returned to normal.

Florian wonders where the president goes when she doesn’t want to be found. Perhaps the underground city known as Mount Weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, or one of the secure facilities tucked away among several polygamist sects in the Wasatch Range where the multiexaflop Utah Data Center analyzes every bit of electronic communication on the planet searching for whatever the current administration and its corporate sponsors consider to be a threat to their privilege and power. More likely she remains aboard Air Force One, visited twice daily by contracted resupply drones until she gets the all-clear from the ground. Hardebeck is almost certainly working on his tan by day and attempting to indulge his various fetishes by night on one of the many islands Pearl Knight owns between the Dominican Republic and Grenada. The rest of the board is probably with Hardebeck, pretending not to know him. Florian is in a secluded two-story cottage with the only person in the world who he trusts anymore: himself. When he arrived the previous morning, he replaced the depleted mineral licks and sweet apple blocks in the metal cages nailed down to old tree stumps in the back, and now he reclines in an upstairs padded window seat and watches the constant procession of deer.

The team is able to communicate freely because they are all connected by the most secure network ever engineered—an initiative that came about through the collaborative efforts of all the United States intelligence agencies and the only private contractor invited to submit a bid: Pearl Knight Technologies. Having firsthand experience with the incompetence and ineptitude so often born of such public and private alliances, however, Florian took it upon himself to do some research into the project managers’ lofty claims.

The handsets developed for the United States by Pearl Knight Technologies use a QRNG—or a quantum random number generator—to generate encryption keys. A QRNG is a closed system which directs a stream of photons through a series of channels, one of which contains a tiny, angled, semitransparent mirror. For reasons no human—physicist or otherwise—can honestly claim to fully understand, each particle is precisely as likely to continue straight through the mirror and strike a sensor representing a 1 as it is to be redirected forty-five degrees to a second sensor
representing a 0. Each random bit is then fed into a portion of memory known as the entropy pool, which constitutes perhaps the most random and unpredictable collection of data in the universe. From the entropy pool, bits are requested and assembled into encryption keys of random lengths, applied, and discarded at a rate of one thousand times per second.

Of course, quantum encryption keys need to be shared across the network in order for it to be possible to decrypt packets on the receiving end, which is accomplished through a second miracle of the quantum universe known as entanglement. When the QRNG chips were printed, they included multiple sets of subatomic particles which were coerced into interacting with each other in such a way as to become entangled at the quantum level. Entanglement is a mysterious form of conservation which requires that the spin of one particle, at the moment it is measured, be precisely anti-correlated to the spin of its entangled counterpart—regardless of the distance between the two particles. As encryption keys are generated, their bits are represented by the spins of entangled particles and therefore shared across the quantum network in a way that is as impossible to intercept as it is to comprehend, and at a rate far beyond even the speed of light.

Florian’s handset lights up and he sees that the president is requesting an update. He touches the screen but leaves the device on his lap. Since nobody is allowed to reveal his or her location, the request is for audio only.