Nathaniel blinked rapidly, blurring the image of the Mind Design lab—not at all sure any of it was real.
The Quiet Man looked around as if sharing Nathaniel's confusion, then continued. "Dr. Plover passed along the name of a woman from the FBI who was in the Mariposa program. She was one of the third stage patients. The Turing Seven were all second stage. Jones snooped and told me the president would chose this agent to investigate the vice president's little incident. If she now has the information Dr. Plover gave to you to deliver—then there may still be a chance to derail Price's plan. She may or may not be feeling similar side effects. It's a risk we have to take."
"Been there," Nathaniel muttered.
"I wonder how Jones will react to all this," Herbert mused. He looked thoughtful. "I mean, he isn't a sophisticated personality. But there's as much of me in him as any of you. If Jones learns that I have been hurt or killed, what will he do? What will that knowledge do to him?"
More men appeared in the chamber, flickering around Herbert, brutally knocking him around. His mouth hung open in terror.
"Christ," Camp said.
One very solid-looking arm reached out and delivered an electric baton to the back of Herbert's leg. The arm withdrew and Herbert folded like a sack of rocks.
The disembodied arms and legs moved in and beat him over and over. Blood spray shot up.
The image flickered and then returned, sharp but quiet—the chamber empty but for a smashed, pitiful body.
Then the body was dragged away.
Jones knew. He had seen it all.
Herbert's uninjured form returned and again looked at the high corner. "If we accomplish the task that Talos set for us, then Axel Price will be in charge of much of our nation, perhaps much of the world. It will be a nasty place to live for everyone.
"A poet once said, 'You won't like what comes after America.'"
Herbert's image froze and faded and did not return.
The projectors shut down with a tiny snap.
Camp pushed up from the couch, face white like bread dough. "Out behind the shack—that's the Quiet Man, isn't it? Fuck this, Nathaniel. We got to leave—now."
Nathaniel remained on the couch, a weird numbness spreading through his chest and neck, up to his head.
The last living message Nathaniel received from Herbert had probably been back in Dubai. The communications since had been from one or more of the linked versions of Jones, recreating Herbert's voice—and now his image, leading them and others, including Plover, down a track of correction and discovery.
They could try to set Jones straight—or deactivate him. But surely it was too late for that. Jones 2.0 was locked in a vault in the mountains of Switzerland, access tightly controlled. Nathaniel was pretty sure the safeguards would keep out even him.
Unless, of course, Jones wanted Nathaniel to get in.
Unless Jones had become the Quiet Man once and for all.
Chan Herbert—the ghost in the machine.
Chapter Forty
Lion County, West Texas
William leveled the candle-sterile knife blade above the boy's sweaty white forearm. The shadowy interior of the pump house fell quiet. The air smelled hot and damp and muddy. From somewhere nearby drifted the punk of an old pile of manure.
The boy was nervous, but after all he had been through, that was to be expected. William squatted in front of him and looked into his face, beaded with sweat and pale from a year in custody. Fifteen: large brown eyes, soft mousy hair, handsome enough but pudgy.
They were all sweating. It was ninety degrees outside even at nine o'clock, and inside the shed was hotter.
Glenn Curteze sat on the gray pump housing and held up the boy's arm. Jonathan Kapp stood on his right, one deeply tanned hand on the boy's shoulder.
The boy swallowed hard. "You're going to cut it out."
William nodded.
"If you leave it in, it'll set off alarms," the boy said, eyes moving between the agents.
"It's got your life history," Kapp said with a narrow smile, hand on the boy's shoulder. "Wouldn't want that to get out, would we?"
"It's down deep," the boy said. "It really hurt when they put it in."
"It's wrapped in a sanitary sleeve," William explained. "Intramuscular injection, state prison issue. At least it's not very big. I see the scar—that pink spot. It's about half an inch below that. I've got some spray that will dull the skin, but we couldn't get anything else on short notice."
The boy locked William's eyes. "Will you guys hold me down . . . please?"
"Of course," Curteze said, shifting left to grip the boy's shoulders. "He'll have it out in a jiffy."
"Then . . . we're leaving? I won't be brought back?"
"That's our plan," William said. "We don't think anyone will extradite, under the circumstances." There was a possibility they'd have to avoid Oklahoma and Green Idaho, but every state west of Texas would offer sanctuary.
"My lawyer told me they were going to transport me down to Huntsville. They didn't even care my dad's with the FBI. I didn't mean to shoot Daryl. We were looking at the guns in the study. His father had a really great collection. Somehow, he found one that was loaded."
"Right," William said. "We've seen the video."
"Please," the boy said. "Do it now."
William applied the numbing spray from a drugstore can. Kapp and Curteze held the boy down. Curteze had a twist of keychain leather in one pocket and he offered it to the boy, who opened his mouth and bit down.
Classic Texas moment, William thought, and pushed the blade down deep and distal.
The boy gave a shriek around the leather.
William plunged in the tweezers, heard the small tink of contact with the chip sheath, and pinched it tight on the first try. Blood welled up from the incision. He used toilet paper to mop up the drops, then dribbled antiseptic powder over the wound and closed it with a Band-aid. No time for stitches.
"All done," William said, and held up the chip.
"Just like The Matrix," the boy said, and then fainted.
William wiped the blade and heated it in the candle flame. "Now me."
All three of the agents had chips.
When the cutting was done, William returned to the van and out of sight of the others, retrieved the case.
He unplugged the case from a rear outlet and poured the snakes onto the edge of the field. They immediately wriggled away, maybe too convincing.
Out here, people liked to shoot snakes.
Chapter Forty-One
California
Nathaniel drove Camp to the Oceanside commuter train station—a midsize steel and glass vault, like a big Quonset hut cut in half—and dropped him off in the parking lot.
Camp took his travel bag with him and didn't look back or wave as he walked through the doors to the passenger waiting area.
With Camp sent on his way, Nathaniel drove back up the broken paved road in the misty dusk, returned to the blockhouse, and sat on the old couch, staring at the blank wall. He tried to feel sadness—no go. Something else undefined had replaced grief, as with fear.
No visuals. No grays highlighted with brilliant colors. His subconscious was utterly clueless about what would happen next.
Outside, fog rolled in. The old fiber optic cable that crossed the ocean and came ashore and snaked its way right up to this blockhouse was no doubt filled with Eastern traffic—a spillover from half the world's billion trillion messages, all the buzz and hype and music and shows and movies and love and hate and codes and schemes, all the essential financial traffic, government traffic, all passing through the small box in the corner, the next-to-greatest pattern recognizer and language analyzer and voice identifier in human history—the elder cousin of Jones 2.0, who might or might not be the true god of this new economic age.
Nathaniel was willing to stay here all night if need be. Sleep had to come. He nodded off for a few hours, and awoke slumped on the couch and cold.
It was early m
orning.
Sometime while he slept, a single lens reappeared from behind the hole in the wall.
It seemed to be watching him.
"Hello, Jones," Nathaniel said. "No more games. No more hiding. We're sad—or we should be, both of us. I'd like to be more help. You've been pointing me in the right direction, haven't you?"
The lens did not move. There was no way of knowing if the ghost was still listening.
After a while, Nathaniel left the blockhouse, closing and locking the battered steel door behind him.
Near the shack, he placed a sprig of dried sage over the shrunken face of the Quiet Man and said his farewells. Then he stared up at the hills to the east, outlined by sky glow from suburban tracts.
He squinted to pick out snipers, killers, other deadly hired hands—hoping for bee vision.
Nothing popped—nothing visible.
Back to the fog creeping in from the ocean, dark and wet and black.
Now for the dangerous part.
Chapter Forty-Two
Washington D.C.
Neither the president's chief of staff nor Thalia Ripper was returning Rebecca's calls or emails. She had been working in a near-vacuum of authority for almost four days; there wasn't much she felt she could do until the president heard the full story of what she had learned so far—along with her own personal revelation or confession.
None of it looked good. Rebecca suspected the president would ask her to remove herself from the investigation.
Roger Baumann met her outside the hotel door and escorted her under the front awning to the armored limo.
"My room was unguarded for a time last night," Rebecca said.
Baumann winced. "We hoped you wouldn't notice."
"I noticed."
"Any problems, ma'am?" Baumann asked.
"No."
Baumann seemed preoccupied—unhappy and unwilling to say more. Rebecca decided not to push it.
The limo took an unusual turn on the short trip, not toward the EEOB but right on H Avenue Northwest. Rebecca leaned forward.
"What's up now?" she asked.
"You've got an appointment."
"With the president?"
"No, ma'am. My boss."
The limo came to a stop in front of Secret Service headquarters. Baumann got out and opened the door. She sat back and braced herself for a moment, never happy with obscurities, then emerged with her usual swivel and push up, and some courteous help from the agent.
"An apology for the lapse?" she asked.
"No, ma'am. My boss would like to spend a few minutes with you before I drop you off at the EEOB."
"Does the president know?"
Baumann shook his head.
"Relevant to my investigation? And in no way compromising the president's trust in me?"
"Yes, ma'am, and Yes again, ma'am."
Rebecca lifted her hand, lead on.
They took an elevator to the basement. He led her down a corridor lined with closed doors to a corner office marked with a temporary standee sign: "Incident Investigation. No Admittance."
Baumann brushed past the sign and opened the door. He held out his arm and a low, clear voice inside welcomed her into the cramped room.
Stacks of media—discs and portable drives—filled open cabinets on one side. Three humming servers sat in a corner on a square metal table, looking small and lonely.
Sitting on a tall-back chair before a small desk, a short, muscular, very bald man turned to face her as she walked in. She recognized the shining dome. She had seen him once before, in a hallway in the West Wing: Daniel Haze, director of the Secret Service.
Haze stood and welcomed her with a tight smile and a handshake. "Glad to finally meet you, Ms. Rose," Haze said.
"Let's be quick," Rebecca said.
"Yes, ma'am." Haze pulled out a folding chair and offered her the tall-backed chair.
Rebecca demurred.
They both sat. "I hear you did a pretty good number on Quinn."
"I tried."
Haze's eyes were light gray and his face was chiseled and square, a prominent chin giving him the look of an actor destined always to portray Nazi generals. He lifted a piece of paper covered with handwritten notes. "But he didn't give you what you wanted."
"You listened in?" Rebecca said.
Haze shrugged. "This is the first time anyone I've protected has been shot—and it is sure as hell the first time for something like Quinn."
Rebecca made a sympathetic "Hmm."
"It's still possible we can help each other."
Rebecca looked into his gray eyes. "I'm happy to cooperate—if the president agrees."
"Have you spoken with the president in the last four days?"
"No," Rebecca said.
"Nobody I know has spoken with her. I hate being out of the loop. Something's wrong, and nobody tells me anything now." Haze leaned his chair back. "She's going outside for her security. Private executive protection services. A really terrible idea. We're still the best in the world at what we do."
"Hmm," Rebecca said again.
Haze lifted a bag and pulled out a broken pair of spex—the same color as the pair Rebecca had been wearing in the Los Angeles convention center. "The EMS folks tossed these into a recycle bin at the hospital where you were treated. My agents retrieved them."
"I'm impressed," Rebecca said as Haze dangled the glasses by a temple piece. "You were already vetting me—before the explosion. Must have been awkward—the convention center bombing wasn't your turf."
Haze nodded. "You'd had these for a few months before the bombing. You downloaded personal data from an older set of FBI gogs a year ago."
"Did you retrieve those, too?" Rebecca felt her face heating.
Haze wrinkled his forehead. "You told investigators someone came up to you at COPES before the blast and introduced himself. Used the name Nathaniel Trace."
"That's right." Rebecca met Haze's gray look. "He wanted to talk—I brushed him off."
"What you didn't tell us was that your spex tagged him as someone you'd met before."
Rebecca looked puzzled. "I was getting a lot of that at the convention. Is he someone of interest?"
"Not to the bombing investigation—not yet, at any rate. But we've done our duty and passed this material on to ATF. May I tell you a little about Mr. Trace?"
Rebecca nodded.
"We ID'd him based on fingerprints from the business card he gave you—"
"You went through my personal effects?"
"It was in the trash, in a bin right next to the spex—along with your ruined clothing. Using that, we confirmed the ID using facial tags from our Homeland Security airport database. He last entered the country under the name of Robert Sangstrom—a very ornate cover identity. Deep detail throughout our system. But that's not your problem, not yet, at any rate. He's a software engineer—something of a pudgy bright boy, according to his employment record. He enlisted in the National Guard, was called up to serve in Iraq—Signal Corps, no combat action—between 2006 and 2008. After that, he returned to the Middle East as a subcontractor for Talos Corporation. He spent a few years working for them in California, then in Jordan and Arabia Deserta. May have been injured in a rebel event in Arabia or Jordan—private evac and medical treatment. Here the trail goes blurry—we can't get into Talos, and nobody's talking. He could have had a legitimate reason for being at COPES, under his own name—but he wasn't registered either as Sangstrom or as Trace. None of the survivors we've interviewed knows anything about him."
"Sounds pretty conspiratorial," Rebecca said.
Haze nodded. "Talos was represented at COPES by three salesmen, but not by Trace. All three of the Talos reps departed the convention center just before the blast. Lucky for them. Has Trace tried to contact you since?"
"No. Do my spex tell you where I met him before?"
"That's lost. Can you remember?"
"I draw a blank." That much was true. This meeting was both unexpe
cted and dangerous. Haze certainly had the power to arrest her, for any number of reasons, and hold her indefinitely—with or without the president's approval.
"Why would Trace want to talk with you? Did he already know about Quinn? Was he trying to warn you?"
"Warn me about what?"
"We got DNA from the business card. We spectro-analyzed Trace's skin oils for chemicals—drugs. Yours, too. Interesting results." Haze held out his hand, dangling the cracked, broken spex. "We're finished with these."
Rebecca took the spex and slipped them into her pocket. "That's it?"
"Both you and Trace tested positive for residues of a metabolite known to be associated with an experimental cancer drug called Seraprixoline. If you have cancer, that would show up in other traces . . . you don't. There's another use, off label, so to speak. It's been used on a limited basis to treat PTSD. Quinn has the same residues, by the way. I'm tracking down information that Talos might have funded this research."
"Oh," Rebecca said.
"Last night, there was a glitch on our Lynx network. Our agent was called away by a false emergency message. We lost track of you for ninety minutes. Then our system crashed. That whole ninety minutes is a void for us. When the system came back online, we heard something unusual. A little boy weeping. Weird, huh?"
"Very," Rebecca said.
Haze gave her a moment to say more, but she just watched him, as interested in his reaction as he was in hers.
"I'm hearing a lot about Talos these days," he said. "Their executive security division is a top contender for the president's private contract. I'm concerned your connections to Trace, and presumably to Talos, might compromise any service you perform for the president. I'm concerned you might be tainted, Ms. Rose."
"I appreciate your concern," Rebecca said. "Are you going to hold me or let me go? I need to make my report to the president—whenever she becomes available."
Haze shrugged. "Just a professional courtesy, actually, at this stage," he said. "Good luck getting through to her."
Baumann dropped her off at the EEOB. She was met by two Marine guards who escorted her in precise silence to her offices, opened the door, and let her in, to meet the startled faces of her assistants, lined up as if for formal inspection.