They must have fought like wildcats. It took the four armed men so long to subdue Jesse and Sophia that Lisa and I had almost covered the distance between us and the nearest building, a big trailer like a portable classroom, before they turned their attention to us. One of their bullets kicked up a cloud of dust not three feet away from me just before Lisa and I flung ourselves around the corner of that building into safety.
By the time we dared to peek back, the SUV was gone, along with Jesse, and Sophie, and as far as I could tell, all hope whatsoever. In coming to Dubai we had marched straight into our enemy’s jaws.
Chapter 78
“The dragonflies,” I said, “they’re drones. Miniature drones that look like dragonflies, with cameras and radios and who knows what else.”
Lisa stared at me like I was on some combination of crack and LSD.
“Interesting,” LoTek said thoughtfully into our ears. We had conference-called him on the Android phones he had distributed at the hotel. “Not the first I’ve heard of the possibility. They might not even be completely mechanical. There were stories as far back as 2005 about the US Department of Defense trying to grow live insects with computer chips and radio antennae in them.”
Lisa looked stunned. “Are you serious? Cyborg insects?”
“A brave new world indeed.”
“I hope so,” I said miserably, “because the old one’s about to end.”
“You certainly managed to fuck things up with record speed.” LoTek sounded more disgusted than distraught. “You’ve only been gone half an hour. You were just supposed to go take a look-see. What a fucking pear-shaped shambles.”
“We know,” Lisa muttered.
She too looked exhausted and beaten. Not only had we failed to stop them, but they now had Sophie, the ultimate prize, and Jesse, who knew all there was to know about Grassfire. There was nothing we could do now except hope against hope that the Russians might decide not to launch. Our roller coaster had gone off its rails and crashed.
“But when an ill wind blows you lemons, and all that,” LoTek mused. “This might work to our advantage.”
The sheer unlikeliness of that reaction startled me halfway out of my despair. “How?”
“Don’t think of it as two captured. Think of it as two infiltrated into their factory.”
Lisa said, “We don’t even know they’ve been taken to the factory.”
“Yes, we do. They just entered its grounds.”
“How do you know?”
“Because unlike some people I could mention,” he said testily, “I wasn’t completely unprepared for suboptimal eventualities. Those phones I gave you all are rigged so they don’t actually switch off when you push the button. Even if you remove the battery, there’s a hidden spare.”
I took a moment to absorb the implications. “You mean you can track them?”
“I can and I am. We’ve been here in sunny Dubai long enough for me to have bent all the local networks to my will.”
“Cute, but what good does it do?” Lisa asked. It seemed to me as well like pointless hacker trickery. “What are you going to do, call the police on them?”
“In a manner of speaking. Not exactly. You’ll see.” He actually sounded amused. “I don’t think you quite understand what it means to own the networks. Normally we hackers can’t actually exercise the mighty powers at our fingertips, or we’d be noticed. Always be invisible. LoTek’s Law. But one silver lining about the onrushing end of the world is that it gives us a good excuse to take some seriously drastic action for once.”
“Drastic action like what?” I asked.
“You really haven’t left us much choice but a frontal assault.”
“A frontal assault? On the factory?” Lisa echoed disbelievingly. “There are hundreds of people in there!”
“Yes. Exactly. Against the two of you,” he said with relish. “Why, it’s almost unfair.”
Chapter 79
Lisa and I watched the Greenwood Technologies drone factory from within the shadow cast by the wall of the construction site across the street. Through the cracks between the vertical slats I could see the vast and vertiginous pit from which the two huge cranes above us grew, and I couldn’t help but think of Tolkien’s Mines of Moria, where dwarves had dug too deep and awakened an ancient evil.
“Listen up.” LoTek’s voice crackled simultaneously from the phone in my pocket and Lisa’s on her hip. I started with surprise; they hadn’t rung, and we hadn’t called. I supposed to him such niceties were cosmetic irrelevancies. “Bit of a confabulation going on inside. I’m going to conference your phones in with Jesse’s so you can hear too. Speak freely, I’ll hear you but they won’t.”
I pulled the Android from my pocket just in time to hear Jesse’s voice, throbbing with fury: “You know what? I can believe you were just playing me the whole time. That’s actually remarkably easy to believe. Right from the beginning, hey? I can believe that. But I can’t believe you’re actually insane, because I know you’re not, but what you’re doing is. Anya, for God’s sake. You’re about to start fucking World War Three, and this is your very last chance to not jump into the abyss. Do you not see that?”
“When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.” Anya sounded amused. “Do you know who said that, Jesse?”
“I need you to consider the possibility that the people you’re working for are out of their fucking minds.” I could hear the strain in his voice. “Please. Just consider that.”
“Perhaps should consider the possibility that they are not.”
“What do you think is going to happen? Fucking World War Three, for real.”
“Really? War on whom? There will be no proof. There will be many theories, us, the drug cartels, the North Koreans, Iranians, Venezuelans, Chinese, and much evidence for each theory, some real, some manufactured. And you know America has no stomach for war. They export it happily, but they cannot face it on their own streets. Even less when they’re already on their knees. No. They will swallow their pride and accept that they are not beyond judgment. That’s what this is. We’re not monsters. When the world rushes to their aid, Russia will be at its forefront, we will lead the reconstruction. It’s not America we want to destroy, only the American empire, America as hyperpower. This is only a balancing of the scales. Believe it or not but it’s truth, Jesse, we are doing this to make the world a better place.”
“America is a cancer on the world,” a male voice added. Dmitri’s voice. “Think of tonight as the first session of chemotherapy.”
Tonight. I went cold. They weren’t going to wait to attack the G8 first, they had changed their plan because of us. Twelve thousand Russian drones would launch from their hidden caches across the USA in a few hours, if they weren’t already in the air. Thousands of deadly kamikaze swarms were about to do their worst to bring America to ruin. Unless we could still somehow stop them.
“Enough.” Anya switched to Russian. A few scuffling noises followed, and then silence, interrupted when a car rolled up beside us. I started, fearing the police, or worse – but it was only a taxi.
The driver stuck out his head. “Lisa? James?”
“That’s us,” I said, relieved.
“I have a package for you.”
The boxes he brought contained two bulbous white helmets almost suitable for spacewalking; two sets of carefully folded thick white fabric made of some ultramodern material, greasy to the touch; two ID smartcards adorned with an impressive seal and covered in equal amounts of Arabic and English; two new fuel cells for our phones, and two tiny Bluetooth phone earpieces.
“Where did you get all this at this hour?” I asked, after inserting my earpiece.
“The Burj al-Arab is a seven-star hotel,” LoTek reminded me drily. The metal and plastic felt odd in my ear, as did the one-sided sound of his voice. “The concierges pride themselves on being able to fulfil their guests’ every request.”