Predator One (10 page)

“That bad?” asked Top.

“Worse,” said Bug. “We hit a wall trying to trace the drone. Was there really no way you could have not blown it to tiny little pieces?”

“Seemed like a good thing to do at the time,” I suggested.

“Yeah, okay, but from the pieces you recovered, we got exactly nothing. No serial numbers,
no recoverable software, nothing. Maybe when the CPU is delivered here I’ll be able to do something with it…” He trailed off to suggest that short of performing actual magic on it, the odds of his getting anything of use were somewhere between slim and none.

Sam Imura gestured at the screen with his coffee cup. “What about the video itself? Can we get anywhere with that? Does it tell us anything?”

“Not much,” Bug admitted. “The postings were sent from the drone to the net via hacked links to communications satellites. There was no other address or identifying server attached to the feed. Like I said, by destroying the machine, we actually slammed the door in our own faces. The drone uploaded a Trojan horse to each satellite, and that allowed the drone’s owner to force the video into the
broadcast stream. That made it pop up on everything from YouTube to the morning farm report in East Workboots, Idaho. Everyone’s talking about this.”

“Okay, but so what?” asked Bunny. “They don’t show his face.”

“No, but the video feed was encoded with a GPS tracker. It shows a covert military op on an island a couple hundred miles off the coast of Chile. They have time, place, and someone speaking
with an American accent.”

“In international waters,” said Sam.

“The way this is being positioned,” said Bug, “it’s saying that our special ops guys are out there doing illegal hits. They don’t need to prove that. The video footage sells it. Remember, social media’s all about the instant buzz. This already has hashtags that are trending pretty heavily.”

“The fuck’s a hashtag?” demanded Top.

Bunny gave him a pitying look. “Damn you’re old.”

“Old people kill young idiots while they sleep. Why don’t you go take a nap?”

Bug grinned. “A hashtag is what they use on Twitter so people can follow a specific conversation or topic. Right now there’s #SpecOpsKillers and #AmericanKillList and #USKillersWhoDiedNow. Like that. People are posting all kinds of theories about who the dead guy is.”

“Anyone calling it right?” I asked.

“Not even close, thank God. Pretty much everyone still thinks bin Laden is dead.”

“He
is
dead.”

“You know what I mean. No one would look at what’s on the net and think it’s Uncle Osama.”

Top shook his head. “Don’t make sense. Why not just show his damn face?”

“Because that’s a different trick,” said Bug. “First you have to build the need to know something
so that it grows as big and as demanding as possible. Then you start dropping clues. I bet you that’s what we’re going to see next. Whoever took that footage is building toward something, and they’re going to ride a social media wave until they’re ready for their reveal.”

The images on the screen were abruptly replaced with the unsmiling face of Mr. Church. He’s a big guy with an even bigger
presence. North of sixty, but not in any way that sanded off his edge. Blocky body, cold eyes, dark hair with some gray.

He said, “There’s been a development.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said.

He ignored that. “Someone has stepped forward to take credit for the video.”

I nearly came out of my chair. “Who?”

“They call themselves the Friends of the Truth.”

“Catchy,” said Bunny. “Look real
nice on a travel mug.”

Sam asked, “We ever heard of them?”

“Not until now,” said Church.

“I’ll run a search,” Bug said, then turned aside to speak to someone off camera, firing off a string of orders in computerese.

“I doubt you’ll find much,” warned Church. “We got this from a call to the White House switchboard. It seems that they are being very careful not to leave an Internet footprint.
I’ll play the message for you.” He tapped a button on his laptop, and a voice began speaking. It was a distorted machine voice.

“We are the Friends of the Truth. We are the servants of justice. We have taken actions that will force you into the light so that everyone will know who you are and what you have done. You have lied to your own people. You have lied to the world. You have lied to God.
How much will He punish you? How much should the whole world punish you? You think you have seen fatwa? You think you have seen jihad? You have not. But you will.”

The call ended.

We sat in silence for a moment. Only Top spoke, and it was a quiet, “Well fuck me blind and move the furniture.”

Chapter Fifteen

Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa

849 Verdier Avenue

Victoria, British Columbia

October 13, 11:51
A.M.

Doctor Michael Pharos sat beside the hospital bed until the burned man woke up. He then adjusted the bed to approximate a sitting position, offered the man some water, and then settled himself back into the leather visitors’ chair.

“Where is Doctor Merriman?” asked the burned
man.

“Gone.”

“When will he be back?”

“He’s not coming back,” said Pharos. “He’s gone.”

“Ah.” A long pause. “Why?”

Pharos considered how best to answer the question and ultimately decided on the truth. A species of it, at least. “You were half asleep during part of the examination. You spoke in your sleep. You mentioned some names that Doctor Merriman did not need to hear.”

The burned man
was not able to blush. The artificial skin that had been grown over his scars did not permit that. But he looked away for a moment.

“I see,” he said. Without turning, he added, “What names?”

“A few of note,” said Pharos. “Hugo Vox and—”

“Gault is dead.”

“Toys—”

“He should be dead, the little shit.”

Pharos inclined his head. “And you mentioned Father Nicodemus.”

The burned man hissed as
if scalded. “I did not!”

“It’s unlikely Doctor Merriman could have invented that name.”

Finally the burned man turned back to him. “He’s a monster, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said Pharos. “I know. Don’t forget, I knew him long before you did. I’ve seen what he’s capable of.”

“Some,” corrected the burned man.

“What?”

“You’ve seen some of what he’s capable of.”

“I saw and heard enough.”

The burned
man stared at him, and something seemed to shift behind his one remaining eye. “Not me.”

“Pardon?”

“I haven’t seen enough of what he’s capable of. If we’re going to complete our project before I’m effing worm meat, then maybe we need someone like him to help move things along.”

“Surely you can’t be serious.”

“Why not? We’ve used him before.”

“And look where it’s gotten us. The Kings have
fallen. You’re all that’s left. One king. Hugo Vox practically worshipped Nicodemus, and now he’s dead and his fall nearly crashed the entire system.”

“The system, Pharos, cannot be crashed. Isn’t that what you’ve bloody well told me a thousand times? It’s on autopilot. It’s a perpetual motion machine. Those are your words.”

“I know, but—”

“But what? Don’t give me another speech about how this
will all work without further influence or action from the executive level. I’m not denying that. But look at me. I’m more dead than alive. Those tests Merriman did? They were cancer screens. He’s been testing me for bone cancer, and the very fact that you haven’t leapt to give me good news lets me know that the news is all bad. I’m dying even faster than we thought. And you know as well as I
do that there’s something happening inside my head. Dementia, early-onset Alzheimer’s. Something. My cognitive functions are dicey at best. My memory is for shit. I can’t remember your name half the time, and the other half of the time I don’t remember what happened to me or how I got like this. No, no, Pharos, your perpetual-motion machine might succeed in bringing down the American government—and
it probably will—but I won’t live to see it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Fuck if I don’t,” snapped the burned man. “If I live until May or June, it’ll be a sodding miracle. Don’t treat me like an idiot, Pharos. Don’t you dare do that.”

The words disintegrated into a spasm of wet coughs that shook the ruined body and made bloody tears leak from the corners of both eyes—the sighted one, and the
dead one. Pharos began reaching out to help, but the burned man snarled at him between the coughs, damning him and ordering him back.

Pharos sat rigid and still and waited for the burned man to be able to speak again.

“Bloody hell…” gasped the dying man. Then he stabbed a finger toward Pharos. “Don’t ever try to tell me a lie about what’s happening to me. So help me God if I find out you’re
hiding things from me, I’ll have you skinned alive. You know I’ll do it, too.”

Pharos said nothing. He waited through another coughing fit.

When it was done, the burned man’s lips were flecked with new blood, and he looked a thousand years old.

“I … I … want him,” he gasped. “I want him right fucking now.”

Pharos did not ask who. He closed his eyes and sighed. Instead, he got heavily to his
feet. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll make some calls.”

“Don’t fail me on this, Pharos.”

“I won’t.”

With that, he turned and shambled from the room, heading toward his office. Going to make the call that would bring Father Nicodemus there.

Chapter Sixteen

The White House

Washington, D.C.

October 13, 3:23
P.M.

Linden Brierly met with the head of the White House Military Office, the chief of staff, two representatives from DARPA’s autonomous-vehicle-design program, and the senior mechanic from the White House motor pool. They spent a grueling two hours going over the data from the complete inspection of the presidential state
car.

No obvious problems were found.

“We’ve pulled the vehicle’s CPU,” explained one of the designers.

“And?” asked Brierly. It had been a long night since the incident with the Beast and the far worse revelation that a CIA splinter cell had been committing a very bizarre form of treason. Even though the media sensation of the short video clip had calmed down, no one in the White House was
getting much sleep.

“Well,” said the designer diffidently, “there’s not really much that we can find wrong with it. A little code error, sure, but we don’t really see how that could have resulted in the vehicle doing what it did.”

“No,” agreed the second designer. “Nothing in the actual programming should have been able to do that.”

“I was there,” said Brierly. “So was Ms. Houston.”

“Oh, we
believe you,” said the first designer quickly. “It’s just that we can’t really understand how this happened.”

“You’re telling us,” said Houston slowly and with no warmth, “that you don’t understand the quirks of a system you yourselves installed in the president’s car?”

Neither designer wanted to tackle that. They looked everywhere but at her.

Finally, the second one said, “We’ve, um, replaced
the whole computer and installed a brand-new software package.”

Alice Houston narrowed her eyes. “When you say ‘new,’ do you mean a different version of the same software?”

“No. A totally different system,” said the first designer. “The one that we’d originally installed was the SafeZone version of BattleZone, which is a part of our Regis program. This isn’t the combat-software package, though.
It’s essentially the same autonomous-control program we developed as a smart-system backup for manned aircraft. Like for when the pilot is incapacitated or the plane’s been hijacked. It’s a backup system.”

“But,” said the second designer, “the version in Cadillac One only has about a hundredth of that code. It was redesigned for that car. We did five thousand hours of test drives and simulations
with it. It’s a good system. It’s pretty much foolproof.”

“Tell that to my lip,” said Brierly.

The designers avoided his eyes this time.

Houston said, “So, what did you replace it with?”

“Ah,” said the first designer. “Something really cool.”

“Cool?”

“Um, what I mean is, something better. It’s a brand-new AI program that is about four jumps past SafeZone. Really sophisticated, but also simple.
The driver has a kill switch, too. And there’s a voice command that we’re synching with the senior NCOs on the motorcade detail. If anything ever happened—”

“And it won’t,” assured the other designer.

“—one command phrase will initiate an immediate code reset. Bang, the whole system becomes passive and the AI goes off-line.”

“You’re sure?” asked Brierly. “We don’t want another fuckup.”

“Absolutely
sure,” they said in unison. “This new system is the best of the best of the best.”

“What’s it called?” asked Houston.

They grinned.

“It’s the absolute king of autonomous, self-guiding software. The king.”

The first designer said, “We call it Solomon.”

Chapter Seventeen

Over the Caribbean Sea

October 13, 3:24
P.M.

Church called back to give us an update. Mostly to say that the news media was trying to build something out of the video, but there wasn’t enough of it for them to use.

“Does the president know about this?” I asked.

“He does.”

“And—?”

“He is not a happy person,” said Church. “POTUS had wanted to stay out of the loop on the
Resort operation until it was done and we had a clean case to take to the attorney general and Congress.”

“Plausible deniability,” I said in exactly the same way you’d say “jock itch.”

Church didn’t comment. “He is very much in the loop now. I shared the mission specifics with him. We cycled the AG and the judge advocate general into the conversation. It was not the most pleasant half hour I
have spent.”