“In ancient China,” I said, “it was actually considered a virtue for a military commander to be unspeakably evil.” Hitler is still a sensitive topic in Germany, so I skipped the comparison. I just said, “That mentality remains to this day in some circles. The man that you’re dealing with is one of them. In fact, he deals closely with China. Years ago, he used to buy machetes cheap from there and provide them to Hutu rebels. They made cheap weapons, since they only cost fifty cents each, but with them they committed genocide against more than a million Tutsis, and from there spread terror—”
“You lie!” she said, her face going pale as chalk. She began trembling and leaned back from me in revulsion.
I had a lot more to tell her — about blood diamonds and arms deals and a recent shipment of stolen uranium — but as I tried to warn her, she grew paler, more rigid, and fell into muttering denials in German. I don’t think that it was that she didn’t believe me, but that the thoughts I spoke about were too horrifying, too repugnant, for her mind to hold.
“Being unspeakably evil is also touted as a virtue by ISIS,” I said. “Especially if that evil is used, ironically, to advance the cause of Allah, to build a world caliphate and bring down, once and for all, the Great Satan and its allies. Because of that, they take perverse satisfaction in deliberately using the good intentions of Westerners against them. For example, in West Africa, when Christian organizations supplied wells to provide clean water for poor villages, your man poisoned them, killed thousands of children, and then said that the Christians themselves had done it.”
She had to know that I was speaking the truth. Certainly, she’d heard tales of it.
“Nein!” Frieda leaped to her feet again, fists clenched once more, eyes blazing. “Nein!” She took two swift steps toward me, and for a couple of heartbeats I thought she was going to pound on me. I could have restrained her without hurting her, but I didn’t like the thought. But she whirled and began pacing her office. “That is a complete fabrication! Terrorists are not using my technology! How could they?”
I’ve seen people transfixed by horror. She wasn’t faking it. Her eyes widened and darted back and forth. I’ve seen people black out from it, rewrite thoughts, erase memories that they couldn’t hold. I knew that she wasn’t owning this.
I let her rant, storming back and forth across the office.
Outside, Ghost barked, whimpered, and barked twice. Bomb.
My heart began racing, and I knew that we had to get out. Frieda’s unwitting ties to the ISIS cell in Syria had to be pretty tight. Enough so that they were probably spying on her.
My glance swept the room. Yep, there they were. A small protrusion like the head of a nail under the deep windowsill; a video pickup the size of a pencil eraser in one corner against the ceiling, camouflaged by the wallpaper pattern; a “chip” in the rim of the desktop. Clumsy bugs that Ghost would’ve detected in a wag of his tail if he’d come in with me.
But I should have spotted them as soon as I followed Frieda in here. The hair rose on my neck again, and my pulse stiffened.
“Fräulein,” I said, keeping my voice absolutely casual as I pushed up from the deep chair, “let’s step outside for a few minutes, take a little stroll. Looks like the rain’s finally stopped.” I cracked a smile. “I’ve probably got a wet, brown dog waiting for me by now.”
I didn’t expect her to come with me. I don’t know if it was the smile or mentioning Ghost, but she stopped pacing, eyed me for a moment, then gave a small nod.
Ghost was damp and already exuding wet-dog odor, but not brown from testing mud puddles. He hadn’t moved from his guard position. I’d known he wouldn’t. He stood as we emerged into the soggy midday and wagged so hard his whole posterior swung back and forth.
“May I pat him?” Frieda asked.
“Be my guest.” While she did, and Ghost squirmed like a puppy and licked her hand, I squinted up the lane. “Fräulein, have you ever seen a Porsche 918 Spyder up close?”
“No, I—”
“Come take a look.” I took her by the elbow, in a totally gentlemanly manner. I didn’t want to scare her. Not yet. And I forced myself, against a slow rise of adrenaline, to stroll.
I waited until we’d left the encircling trees behind, with their “security” monitors. Waited until we’d practically reached the car. Then I stopped and turned her to face me. And I told her exactly what was going on. All of it. Top-secret umpety-ump be damned.
“Get in the car and don’t look back,” I begged. “We can worry about nondisclosure statements later. Your life and the lives of your employees aren’t worth dog crap if you stay here.”
She’d resumed her human ramrod posture. She stared at me with her jaw set, then made her decision. “You Americans! You are always full of crazy imaginations and wild stories.” She spun on her heels.
I made a swipe for her arm. She shrugged away from it. “Frieda, you’ve got to believe me,” I pleaded.
She didn’t reply, didn’t glance back.
I didn’t go after her. I didn’t know if ISIS was live monitoring her office or just replaying things later. I stood by the Spyder, Ghost at my side, and watched her march back up the lane, across the tree-hemmed lawn, into the lovely old house.
I should go in and warn everyone, I thought, get them out of there.
The explosion’s deep boom reached me a second or two after the black-and-orange billow blew out three front windows on the second floor. Frieda’s office. The bomb must have been stowed in the armoire, I thought.
“Damn.” I called Ghost, slid into the Porsche, and just sat, watching smoke billow, black and toxic, from the shattered windows, as ash and debris peppered my hood.
I actually jumped when my satellite phone sounded. So did Ghost, since he was sitting on it. I scooped it out from under his furry backside and muttered, “Yeah?”
“They’re back, Cap.”
Under other circumstances that line would’ve prompted a poltergeist quip. It took a moment to realize what Church meant. “Who, our little ISIS scientist shits?”
“Seems they went off for a celebratory feast. They’ve got an important visitor.”
“Let me guess,” I said, and named Frieda’s contact.
He didn’t ask how I knew, but there was a respectful silence at the end of the line for a moment.
“So,” he said, “should we light them up now?”
“Do it now,” I said. “I want to see craters where their assholes were.”
Smoke from the burning house melded into the lowering sky as I wheeled the Porsche around, into a fresh wall of rain. But Frieda Stoltz’s face glowed in my mind, radiant and eager as she showed me her creation.
I felt unaccountably happy. When it comes to death’s delivery systems, no one is better than us. Those damned ISIS scientists probably couldn’t comprehend the laser guidance system of the PAVEs we’d deployed on our GBU-38s. They wouldn’t understand how our satellites made sure that the bombs kept coming, coming, to fly right up their butts.
Fuck ’em. Some people are too evil to live.
But that day I began to wonder if some people are too innocent for their own benefit. I wondered if Frieda had been too good to live.
David Farland is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy, with more than fifty books in print. Currently, he is in the process of writing a thriller that deals with the dark underbelly of filmmaking in Hollywood called The Blockbuster.