I waited for someone to dispute that analysis. Nobody did. Sophie looked like I felt, like she was drowning, lost and helpless. I wondered how many would die if and when the Russians pulled the trigger, on that day – today? tomorrow? – when every cable and pipe and road and grocery store in the USA went dark and empty.
I remembered what Sophie had said after landed in Colombia, that she could guarantee that Michael Kostopoulos wouldn’t be the last victim of a drone. How right she had been.
Michael Kostopoulos.
Michael Kostopoulos.
“Hey,” I said slowly. Everyone looked at me. “Who killed Michael Kostopoulos?”
“Ortega,” Sophie said impatiently. “Let’s get back to -“
“No, he didn’t. I asked when I was there. Dmitri had never even heard of him, and he commanded Ortega’s drones. So who sent the drone that got Kostopoulos?”
The question rippled around the table.
Jesse said, “If it wasn’t Ortega, it must have been the Russians, right? No one else had those drones.”
“Exactly. But why would the Russians murder a DEA agent in Colombia?”
Nobody had an answer.
“Interesting,” Sophie admitted.
“Huh.” LoTek pursed his lips. “Be worth looking into his notes and files, if we could. But we can’t. Even I can’t hack into the DEA’s repository, not overnight.”
“Would it help if you had another DEA agent’s password?” Lisa asked.
He rolled his eyes at her apparent naivete. “Sure, with an in like that it would be easy. But how exactly do you expect us to find -“
Jesse laughed.
“Don’t be too terribly alarmed, Mr. Tek or whatever it is you call yourself,” Lisa said drily, “but I happen to be a DEA agent in good standing. They gave me a badge, a gun, and a login. I never realized that last might be the most dangerous.”
“You’re DEA?” LoTek regarded Lisa as if she had tentacles. “Fucking hell. This Grassfire lark may take some getting used to. I’m not accustomed to having suits on my side.”
“Call me a suit one more time and I won’t be on your side much longer.”
He smiled. “Give me half an hour. That’s all I’ll need.”
Chapter 75
I stood on the balcony and looked down at glittering Dubai. The others were still in the living room, clustered around Jesse and LoTek as they hacked into the DEA, but I needed some space. Everything was happening too fast. The whole world was changing, and I had somehow found myself inside one of the axes on which it turned. If we screwed up, and so far it seemed like we had done nothing but, we would fail not just ourselves but all humanity.
I had asked for an extraordinary life. Now I wanted to give it back.
I heard footsteps approach, recognized their rhythm immediately, winced.
“How are you doing?” Sophie asked softly.
I didn’t look at her. “What do you care?”
“James. That’s not fair.”
“Not fair?” Infuriated, I turned to face her. “You frame me as an arms dealer to terrorists and drug cartels, you destroy my entire life behind my back, you lie to me from the day we met, and you say I’m being unfair to you?”
“I never lied to you.”
The fact that this was probably technically true only heightened my fury.
“I had to,” she said quickly, reading my expression. “The stakes were too high. We’re talking about the future of everything. Where we go as a species. No one was supposed to find out, but if they did, I had to have a cover story, and you were the only possibility.”
“Of course. Yeah, obviously. People like me are expendable. Not you, of course, not with your epic fucking messiah complex.”
“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she said quietly. “I really do. But I had no choice. I couldn’t sit by in Pasadena and do nothing. I love you, James. I never even believed in love until I met you. If I could have sacrificed myself instead of you, I would have. Of course I would have. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that I just couldn’t?”
“So you fed me to the wolves.” I shook my head. “Jesus. You’ve got one funny fucking definition of love.”
“It couldn’t be about just us. I wish it could have been. But I had to worry about more than us, or me, or you. You don’t understand what it’s like. That kind of responsibility. The world on your shoulders.”
I looked straight into her eyes for the first time since her reappearance. “Actually, thanks to you, I now have a pretty fucking good idea. And you know what? I wouldn’t sell my friends out, and I would never, ever, have sold you out, no matter what, no matter what the stakes were, no matter what I saw coming. That’s the difference between you and me.”
She didn’t look particularly chastened. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Meaning you think I’m wrong.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter any more. We can’t roll the clock back. But for what it’s worth, yes, if I have to choose between losing the man I love and saving everyone else, then I have to save everyone else. So do you. So does everyone. It’s our duty. For most people the choice between love and duty is never more than hypothetical, but for people like us, sometimes it’s real.”
“People like you. Homo superior.”
She half-laughed. “I wish I was. But being smart doesn’t make it any easier. I mean people like you and me. People who find ourselves in this kind of crazy situation. I’ve hated myself, I’ve despised myself every step of the way for what I’ve done to you. But I had to. It was necessary. Can’t you see that?”
“Fuck necessary,” I said. “You can justify anything as necessary, if you try. Whatever happened to doing what you think is right?”
Sophie had no answer.
“Excuse me,” Danielle’s cool voice intruded from the door. “Sorry to interrupt. But we think we’ve got something.”
Chapter 76
Our Rolls-Royce rolled across the causeway towards the mainland, driven by a dapper young man named Ahmed who spoke excellent English. I wondered how frankly we could speak in his presence. He didn’t seem to be listening to us, he almost certainly wasn’t a police informant or FSU agent, but paranoia was becoming reflex.
Dubai by night was lit up like the world’s largest Christmas tree. Boulevard Sheikh Zayed, the main drag paralleling the coast, was lined by towering architectural marvels and magnificent monstrosities, and full of badly driven luxury cars, but the industrial district we entered was devoid of any such aesthetic appeal. Grim factories, sprawling warehouses, and mountains of shipping containers contrasted starkly with the barren desert that lay between and beneath the wide roads and huge complexes, as if biding its time before reclaiming its territory.
The factories and assembly plants hummed and churned. We passed converted school buses full of Indian labourers with shadowed faces; barren walls; anonymous compounds; corporate names emblazoned in Arabic and Roman script; a mosque whose elegant mosaics and yearning minarets seemed out of place amid all this industrial ugliness. It felt like driving through an Arabic variant of a classic sci-fi Mars city, like we were in some domed biosphere and all these machines and people were working overtime to keep our atmosphere breathable.
Some months ago, we had learned, a nameless informant had told Michael Kostopoulos that shipping containers full of mysterious equipment were being smuggled from Venezuela to Colombia. He had investigated, tracked these containers back to their port of entry, and connected them to bribes paid to a Venezuelan cabinet minister named Ramirez. That was as far as Kostopoulos got before he was assassinated; but LoTek had connected the bank account from which those bribes had come, via a chain of shell companies and international money transfers, to Greenwood Technologies, which owned the factory that was our destination.