He told them about what had happened in Lulu’s apartment in Cambridge, how the place had attacked them and how even her toy Dino-Bot had attempted to kill them. He told them about what had happened in China. He told them about the assassin in Georgetown, about the hidden messages they’d been receiving from Mr. X and his exhortations that they find out who was behind Zimmerman’s death.
The more he told them, the more nonsensical it seemed. Mysterious intelligence sources from cyberspace. Houses that blew themselves up. VR feelings of doom. Ludicrous.
And to top it all off, HAL2. Some kind of inhuman nemesis. An AI conspiracy. Even to Decker, it seemed like a kind of cartoon. A bad action flick.
And yet he was absolutely convinced it was true.
As he told his story, Decker found himself looking about the utility room at all of the machines and devices arrayed on the counter. Even the coffee machine seemed to regard him with newfound intelligence.
Was that red light a camera? Or was it simply a small LED indicating the burner was on?
When would the drills and the desk saw and lathes come to life?
All of the appliances and gadgets, all the tools and electrical conveniences that had once been a part of the natural backdrop of modern existence, since Boston and Bondville, now bore a malevolent hue. Now, they idled like owls on dark branches at night, waiting for some hapless mouse to run by. They waited and watched.
“That’s enough,” Hellard said. “All the evidence points to you as the source of the leaks, Decker. We even have a money trail leading right to your door. We know you’ve been working with other groups, such as Anonymous, to infiltrate sensitive industrial and classified military systems. We know you were involved in that break-in at Westlake Defense Systems.”
Decker shook his head. “Involved. Yeah. I found it, you idiot! I just have one question for you,” he said. “Who authorized a Hellfire missile strike from a Predator drone on a passenger car on a busy American highway? Did you, Hellard? I’m betting you didn’t. Not even you would cross over that line. And certainly not you, Rex. You don’t have the authority. Then who did?”
Decker repeated the question so relentlessly that eventually Hellard was forced to put in a call to the commander at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. No, he insisted. The order came from the Pentagon. So, Hellard took it upstream. But, when he confronted General Haye in DC, the alleged source of the order, he flatly denied it.
“Are you insane, man?” he said. “A drone attack on an American citizen, on American soil?”
Finally, in frustration, Hellard placed the 66th Air Base Group commander from Hanscom on the line with General Haye.
“But I know it was you,” said the commander. “I recognized your com code, sir. It came across SIPRNET. It must have been you. We asked you to confirm the order three times, given its nature, sir. I even had the Staff Judge Advocate take a look-see. She assured me that while covert action programs require Presidential authorization and formal notification to the Congressional intelligence committees, no such requirements apply to Special Access Programs, like this strike. And when I—”
“Thank you, General,” said Hellard. “Commander. I’ll brief you both personally later. You’ve been very helpful.” He broke the connection.
“It was HAL2,” Lulu said. “Don’t you get it? He made you think it was General Haye. He knows his com code, his security passwords, even his private IDs. By now, the General has no more secrets. HAL2’s been monitoring his keyboard activity for weeks, in all probability, recording all keystrokes of interest. Passwords and passcodes Account numbers. Search queries. Emails to intimates. You name it. Everything.”
“You too?” he continued. “You buy into this Matrix, Skynet bullshit.”
Lulu nodded. “I do.” She looked over at Decker. “I believe him.”
“Well, I don’t. I still rely on evidence before I reach a decision. I’m old-fashioned that way. And all the evidence points to a different conclusion.” He looked back at Decker. “It points to you, Special Agent Decker. You decided to go rogue and fly off to China. You decided to compromise our ally, Israel, by enlisting the support of Mossad agent Ben Seiden. Less than an hour after being suspended and asked to stand down, you kill a man blocks from your house and then intentionally blow his face off so that we’ll think that he’s you and you can avoid the authorities. You kidnap or recruit — time will tell — an MIT professor, and sometime NSA consultant, Xin Liu, and head to Vermont where you masquerade as reporters and break into Matt Zimmerman’s house, all the while claiming that this billionaire entrepreneur was somehow killed by his own avatar… when everyone else says it was just a car accident.”
“Cyber-doppelgänger,” said Decker.
“Whatever. On one hand, you make wild, ungrounded accusations against Allied Data Systems, one of this country’s most valued military contractors. On the other, we have definitive proof, documented evidence in the form of correspondence from you via Dandong to Tehran instructing members of the Crimson Scimitar to break into Westlake and other military facilities, to not only steal important state secrets but to intentionally sabotage weapons systems so that they’d fire on friendly forces. Which is exactly what is happening to our systems right at this very moment all over the world. And, to top it all off, we now discover that you’ve been hiding secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg valued at more than forty million dollars, transferred to you from accounts in Cyprus suspected of being affiliated with Crimson Scimitar cells.”
“I demand to see an attorney,” said Decker.
“You’ve been arrested under the Patriot Act. You don’t have the right to an attorney.”
“Then I want to see Senator Fuller.” For some reason, out of nowhere, Decker had remembered the friendly face of the senior legislator from Vermont. The old man, a vocal opponent of the Total Information Awareness program, had once gone out of his way to show Decker the ropes when the young agent had been ordered to serve on an anti-terrorism Congressional panel following the El Aqrab incident. “He’ll listen to what I have to say.”
McCullough turned and looked over at Hellard. Hellard just shrugged.
“What?” Decker said. “Are you going to tell me I can’t even talk to a United States Senator? You’ve gone too far this time, Hellard. When word of this leaks out…”
“You don’t know?” said McCullough.
“Know what?”
“Senator Fuller was killed in a car accident yesterday. On his way home from Congress. His town car was struck by a truck from behind.”
“What are you going to do now?” Hellard said with a laugh. “Tell us it was a robot driving the truck, one of Google’s driverless vehicles? I don’t subscribe to your conspiracy theories. I’m the kind of man who’s unduly influenced by one thing and one thing alone — facts. I’m afraid that the longer we wait here, the more insecure and unstable our entire security grid becomes. If classified networks like SIPRNET are already compromised, what’s to stop them from doing something worse than a little friendly fire? What about dropping the White House security system and letting an Al Qaeda wet team into the First Family’s sleeping quarters? How about hacking our nuclear launch codes?” He nodded and the Hispanic man with the buzz cut stepped up to the counter. “We need to find out which government or terrorist group is behind these attacks or we won’t be able to defend ourselves or retaliate? Who paid you that money?”
The Hispanic man picked up what appeared to be a carpenter pincer. He looked down at Decker’s hands, raised his own, and pretended to cut the tips off his own fingers, one by one, as if trimming his nails. “Snip, snip,” he said with a grin.