Predator One (38 page)
“Well … shit,” I said.
“I know. So freaky. I
mean … this has to be tied to what happened to Rudy. This has to be tied to that guy Nicodemus, right?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
Operative word: “afraid.”
My next call was to Church, but I couldn’t get through. So I called Yoda at the Hangar. He was Bug’s second in command.
“We’re, ummmm, all over this.” He is one of those people who always makes some kind of noise. Mostly a strange little
humming sound. He always sounds like a pedantic bumble bee. Charming for about half a minute and then intensely irritating thereafter.
“I want more than that, Yoda.”
“Mmmmm, meaning what, mmmm, exactly?”
“I have two guys heading to the airport for a direct flight to Eglin. They’re taking a MindReader station with them, and we’re going to take over control of the investigation. At least as far
as the software and hardware goes. Mr. Church doesn’t want us to interfere with the military’s investigation.”
“Top will oversee that,” I said, but Yoda told me I was wrong.
“Mmmmmm, Mr. Church ordered Top and Bunny to, ummmm, head to San Diego.”
“Why? They’re needed at Eglin. I was just talking to them an hour ago.”
“They’re already on a, ummmm, plane.”
“What’s happening?”
He took another
breath. “We have another, ummmm, drone thing,” he said. “I, ummmm, think the Kings are using food-delivery drones to target citizens.”
Chapter Eighty-four
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
March 31, 5:09
P.M.
Doctor Davidovich sat in his room and stared at nothing. The room’s lights were off, and he sat in an envelope of darkness.
Without and within.
He was trying to detach his mind from the strangeness of the moment, from the bizarre theatrics of his encounter with Doctor Pharos and the Gentleman. The lights
were off so that his attention could not be pulled toward his computer or the stacks of notebooks that had come with him from his years in captivity.
He wanted to think. To take stock. To lay out the chronology of his personal descent from the man he thought he’d been to the man he clearly was. Aaron Davidovich was neither religious nor sentimental enough to view this process as his “long, dark
night of the soul.” That was a laughable thought.
A dark few hours in a posh resort on one of the outer rings of hell. It would make a good reality show.
Life in Hell,
with Aaron Davidovich.
The truly sad thing was that he would probably watch that show.
He wished he had it on DVD now so he could binge watch it. He wanted that kind of telescoped perspective. All of the seasons of his life.
Teen nerd. College wunderkind. Hot prospect scouted by top universities. The man
Scientific American
called the “Computer Einstein.” Then, the DARPA years. The government’s excitement about Regis.
Then Boy.
Then the years as a prisoner.
The new work. Regis. The master-control program. The masterpiece of the quantum computer.
Boy.
Those days with her. The nights.
There were such tangled memories
there. Horrible and …
And what?
His mind had been going for alliteration.
Horrible and … hot.
So hot.
Those nights when she came to him in the blank hours between a dying midnight and a mysterious new dawn.
The first time was after a meal with Boy. She’d made quinoa pasta with turkey-meat sauce, broccoli, and crusty whole grain bread. They washed it down with a good Italian red, and all
during the meal Boy sat close to him, her knee touching his thigh. They’d listened to Cambodian music and talked about the scientific and artistic requirements of performance. Sometimes they laughed. They never talked about work over meals. Never.
That night, she crept into his bed and made love to him. If “love” was a useful word for what happened. Boy never spoke when they were in bed. The
lights were always out, the room in total darkness. She never let him touch her. He had to lie there and experience what she did with her small, clever hands, with her mouth, with her skin, with her wetness. Over the years, she’d come to him seven times.
Seven.
That first time, it seemed utterly random, a product of too much wine and the enforced closeness in the apartment. But then Davidovich
realized that it had to be a response to what had happened earlier that day.
Had to be.
That was the day he’d cracked the encryption that DARPA had put on Regis in the days following his abduction. Davidovich cracked it and used one of several back doors he’d built into his system to intrude and access passive programs hidden within the code. The fact of those back doors and the passive codes
were something the Seven Kings seemed to already know about. Or maybe they presumed they would be there. Davidovich was known for being possessive. It was a character trait they had clearly expected to exploit when they’d taken him. It might have been as important to them as the nature of his genius. Though it was also well known in the world of advanced software design for the creator to build
such deliberate portals into their work. Partly as a way of accessing the system should there be a failure in the primary control software, and partly because they could. The only real trick was to design a back door that could not be discovered by the aggressive security software used to find such things.
Davidovich found even the most belligerent hound-dog security programs to be both a personal
affront and a challenge. He was absolutely positive that no one—not even the top tier of computer experts like Bug at the DMS, even with MindReader—could find his escape hatches.
On that day, when he’d cracked the encryption, Regis lay back and spread its legs for him, welcoming him like a familiar lover. Davidovich had gone into the system, touching subroutines with knowing hands. This was his.
It did not matter to him that it was a work for hire for the Department of Defense. Who were they? At best, they were patrons. How many people could name Da Vinci’s patrons? One in ten thousand? How many knew Da Vinci? Everyone.
That night, Boy had come to him and did things to him that Davidovich’s wife never even did with her dentist lover. She’d left him sprawled on the floor, one leg hooked
on the edge of the bed, the sheets soaked and torn. The next morning, when he tried to talk about it, Boy did not respond. After he tried several times to engage her in playful next-day postcoital banter, she’d kicked him in the groin. Very fast, though not very hard. Enough to bend him over and make him nauseated for hours.
After that, he learned his lesson.
It was four months before she came
to his bed again.
That time, and every time thereafter, he followed her unspoken set of rules. Not merely because he was afraid of her beatings. And not entirely because he hungered for her touch and all the physical mysteries she shared with him on those dark and silent nights.
No, what he wanted was her approval. He knew that about himself; he understood it. He wasn’t proud of it, but he accepted
it.
Sex wasn’t the only way she showed her gratitude and approval. Eighteen months ago, after he’d devised a simple hacking virus that would allow Regis to infect any autonomous automobile program with a new version of Enact, Boy gave him a DVD to watch. On the DVD, Davidovich saw surveillance footage of two people being mugged. His wife and her lover. The attack happened in a parking garage.
One man came out of the shadows, clamped a hand over his wife’s mouth, and wrapped an arm around her throat, while two other men—both of them in black clothes, gloves, and ski masks—systematically beat the dentist into a red heap. They didn’t kill him, but they paid particular attention to his groin, his hands, and his knees. And they knocked out every one of his teeth. They did not injure Davidovich’s
wife, but she was a screaming wreck when they finally released her and melted away.
Davidovich was positive that the two men doing the beating were Mason and Jacob.
Davidovich wanted to be shocked, horrified, appalled.
Instead, he watched it again.
Then he went into the bathroom and masturbated.
Afterward, he threw up and sat in a hot shower for an hour, boiling away his shame. He never commented
on the DVD, nor did Boy.
Another time, after he had presented the schematics for a miniature version of the QC he was building and explained that it could be used in drones as small as a common pigeon, he’d received another gift. An extremely pretty girl asked his son to the dance. It did not matter to Davidovich if the girl was actually a twentysomething passing for a teenager. It didn’t matter
that she was a Seven Kings employee, probably a prostitute, who was part of the team keeping tabs on Matthew. All that mattered was the sheer joy on his son’s face.
Davidovich was certainly smart enough to know that he was being manipulated. Threats first, then a show of consideration. Then sex. It was all part of a careful but—to him—obvious plan of corruption. He had, in fact, been corrupted
by it. He was thoroughly corrupt now. His postabduction work with Regis, the other software he’d written over the last few years, the QC, the drones, the takeover of autonomous vehicle software—all of that proved that he was every bit as much a monster as Pharos and the charcoal briquette. Each of those things was another drop of water onto the smoking embers of his soul. Absolutely. No doubt about
it.
And yet.
As he sat there in the dark, he thought of two people.
The first was Boy. He wanted her. He ached for her. Even though he was only ever a passive lump of flesh to her. Although he was never allowed to touch her, not even in the fiercest moments of their coupling, he wanted her. He felt something suspiciously like love for her. And it did not ameliorate it one whit to know that
this was some perverse spin on Stockholm syndrome. Understanding a thing did not necessarily mean that you were free of it. Ask any addict. Ask an alcoholic who has been ten years dry but who reaches for a bottle after a few consecutive personal setbacks. They understood.
He thought of Boy and wondered how far into hell he would go if he knew that she would come to his bed one more time. Just
once.
Davidovich knew that he would shovel coal into the devil’s furnace for one more touch.
In the darkness he shook his head.
Then, in the next moment, he thought of the other person who was never far from his thoughts.
Matthew.
His son.
“Goddamn it,” breathed Davidovich. In the darkness, he spoke his son’s name.
“Matthew.”
Matthew.
The tears started then.
“I did it for you,” he told
the image of his son that he kept safe in his mind. Not the teenager, not the college-bound young man. The picture in his mind was his son as he had been on the day he was born. A tiny thing. Pink and helpless. Crying because he had no power at all in the world. Crying because everything was strange and new and he didn’t understand anything.
Davidovich had taken him from the nurse and kissed
the squalling face. Each cheek. The forehead. The little heaving chest, over the fluttering heart. Then Davidovich had cuddled the infant to his own chest and soothed him and whispered to him. Promises of love. Promises of protection. Promises of always being there.
Promises.
Gone, now. Cracked by Boy and her thugs, but comprehensively ground into dust beneath Davidovich’s own feet. Month by
month, day by day since the CIA safe house.
Maybe before.
“Matthew,” he said. Davidovich did not recognize his own voice. He was certain it was not the same voice that had whispered those promises to a newborn a million years ago.
There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
—MAHATMA GANDHI
Chapter Eighty-five
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
March 31, 5:42
P.M.
Toys felt as if he’d lost any contact with the real world.
He’d been at the hospital for a full day, and so far, except for that one call with Mr. Church, he felt as if the full sum of his usefulness was a few ticks below zero.
He sat on the floor outside Circe’s room. The massive
dog, Banshee, lay on the other side of the wall. Inside the room. Junie was in there, too. Everyone else was outside in the hall. Lydia was pacing incessantly up and down a twelve-foot line in front of Circe’s door, her booted feet making soft sounds as she passed within inches of where Toys sat.
Toys closed his eyes, unwilling to endure the vile looks the DMS agent threw him on every turn. He
went into his head and thought about the wild stories Hugo Vox had told him about Nicodemus. Impossible stories. Mythical fantasies and outright horror stories. All of which Hugo swore were true. Since he’d heard Rudy Sanchez speak the name of the monstrous little priest, Toys had felt as if the world was cracking and falling apart around him.
Toys had even seen the little priest at Hugo’s estate
in Iran, though he had begged off from an actual introduction. He’d heard too many tales about how those introductions often went. Nicodemus liked to make a lasting impression on a person. Some people never quite recovered from those encounters. There were rumors of at least two suicides directly following private meetings. In those days following the fall of the Kings, when Hugo and Toys lived
in Iran, Toys had begun his downward slide into regret, shame, and self-hatred. Even at his worst, though, he was too clever to risk an encounter with someone for whom the word “chaos” seemed to have been deliberately invented. The priest was a trickster. A monster in every sense that Toys could imagine. And Toys was not entirely sure he was human.
So, no, he had chosen not to shake the man’s
hand or stand in his company.