“Louie, are we done?”
Louie’s smile broadened. “Until next week,” he told him. “Next Friday night.”
“Bigger purse?”
“After this? I’d say so.”
“I need the money.”
“Don’t we all,” said Louie, a ribbon of smoke curling lazily from the cigar’s end. “Don’t we all.”
In the locker room with distant cheers of the next fight coming through the cinderblock walls, Kimball sat on the bench undoing the tape that was wrapped around his wrists when Tank Russo was aided to a nearby medical table with his trainers aiding him into a supine position.
Kimball glanced up long enough to see Tank wave off his team before going back to the unwrapping.
Tank turned to him. “That was just a lucky kick, dude.”
Kimball ignored him.
Then: “Dude?”
Kimball faced him, his features appearing taxed. “What.”
“That was a lucky kick.”
“If you say so.” He went back to undoing the tape.
A short lapse of silence followed before Kimball spoke, his eyes focusing on the tape as he unwound the strips rather than looking at the man on the table. “Are you OK?”
Tank nodded, his eyes looking ceilingward. “A little dizzy,” he answered. “And I can feel a headache coming on.”
“You need to get yourself looked at — make sure you don’t have a concussion.”
Tank turned to him. “J.J. Doetsch,” he said. “How come I never heard of you before? It’s obvious this isn’t your first time to the rodeo.”
Kimball smiled. “I thought you said it was just a lucky kick.”
Tank proffered his own smile, an icebreaker between burgeoning friendships. “That was just my ego talking. You know how it goes in this business.”
Kimball finished with unrolling the tape from his wrists, tossed them in a trash can, and walked up to Tank who lay there with partially glazed eyes. But intuitive eyes as well.
Tank saw the scars, lines and bullet pocks along Kimball’s ripped body, the obvious wounds of battle. “You ain’t new to this, are you?”
“Cage fighting? You were my first.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” he said. “You’re my first cherry pop.”
Tank faced the ceiling. “Lucky me,” he said.
Kimball placed a kind hand on Tank’s shoulder and smiled. “Yeah. Lucky you.”
When Kimball returned to the bench Louie was standing there with eight crisp Benjamins fanning out from his grasp. “Your take,” he said, “as we agreed upon.”
Kimball took the money and stared at it for a long moment. It’s not that he had never seen that amount before or held them for simple homage. It was the way he earned it — by ritualistic brutality that catered to the whims of the masses.
It was blood money.
He took the bills, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket that hung on a hanger in his locker. “Thanks, Louie.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow at work, then. We’ll talk about next Friday night.” After pumping a victorious fist in excitement, Louie was no doubt heading for the Blackjack tables with his roll.
“You’re going to be a champion someday,” said Tank. “You know that, don’t you? You’re going to be right up there because you give the people what they want: a vicious wrecking machine that takes his opponents out without conscience or care.”
Kimball sighed, and then said evenly, “Without conscience or care, huh?”
Tank nodded. “That’s right, buddy. And that’s why you’re going to be a bankable star in this business. When I first saw you I thought you were just a stupid greener just standing there. Just cool and calm is what you were. Grace under pressure like I’ve never seen before. You showed me nothing, as if you were completely empty.”
Kimball stared briefly into open space before turning to the lump of bills bulging from his shirt pocket within the locker. It was so easy, he thought. The money. An obvious pull since he was good at it. But what panged him to no end was that Tank Russo instantly saw in him what others have been saying about him since the beginning: that Kimball Hayden was a man without conscience.
And a man without conscience can never see the salvation within God’s eyes.
Kimball was suddenly full of regrets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Although Leonid Sakharov worked more than ten hours straight, he did not allow his fragility to slow his pace. In fact, Sakharov appeared to have more of a bite to his stamina, more of a hitch to his gait as he roamed from one unit to another, from one monitor to the next.
While Levine stood sentinel by the bay doors, one of the few spots in the lab afforded to him by Sakharov, he watched the old man operate the nanoscopic machines with eagerness that had been missing in the old man since leaving Vladimir Central, and subsisting on the memories of someday returning to his one true love: nanotechnology.
And here he was, inside a lab with the most advanced technology the profits of oil could buy despite the UN sanctions that crippled the country.
In the fore of the lab Sakharov was seated before the most powerful microprocessor in the world that had millions of transistors just a few dozen nanometers wide, a nanometer being a billionth of the size of a meter. The technology was a marvel in the eyes of Levine, the machinery incomprehensible since something manufactured that was a billionth of size truly existed. But the Holy Grail was the Assembler, Sakharov’s pride and joy. The machinery was state-of-the-art technology that built nanobots molecule by molecule until molecular chains were created, the chain itself becoming the fusion of the nanobot.
With quick efficiency drawn from memories, Sakharov expertly crafted molecular chains that would take on a programmed life of its own and replicate. To program a lifespan and to give it a platform to perform to the will of their Creator was a different matter, a different process. So for years he sketched theories in his mind. And now that he was handed the opportunity to accomplish the means during the twilight of his life, Sakharov was creating with much success. Within hours he created the chains. Within days he designed a program to imbue in the molecules. Within a month he would become a God.
The makeup within the nanobots was a predesigned half-life with every subsequent bot living approximately half the lifespan of its predecessor. This was a safety feature to keep the nanobots from replicating exponentially, based on Drexler’s theory that unrestrained growth would cause the bots to consume all organic material on Earth within weeks.
With half a lifespan with every replication, their time would always be minimized to the point where each and every bot would exist down to a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, hardly time for them to exist long enough to do any damage, which was Sakharov’s goaclass="underline" Maximum damage in the beginning, zero to none thereafter.
At the end of the day and at a specific time, Sakharov would create a disk of the day’s acquired data and proffer it to Levine who was summarily escorted by two Quds soldiers to the Comm Center. This was the only time he was allowed into the communications station per agreement between al-Sherrod and al-Ghazi, and through President Ahmadinejad. Since the data was crucial, since a tenebrous alliance was born between factions with a common goal, since trust remained at a bare minimum, Levine was able to, via imaging satellite, speak to al-Ghazi, whose image appeared slightly grainy on the live feed on the monitor screen.
After placing the disc into the required slot of the computer, Levine spoke into the lip mike. “Download today’s data,” he said evenly.
On another screen designs of molecular chains, nanobots and buckyballs, along with scientific equations, formulas and rows of text, downloaded, the screen becoming a cyberscript of symbols and rune-like designs. Once the material was downloaded, he said, “Send specifications to given address: Tehran. Al-Ghazi.”