Lisa said, “Let’s make a deal.”
“What deal?” Anya asked.
“You intended to get Sophie out of here, aren’t you? To Russia? You need to accept that’s not going to happen. If we don’t cut a deal, then sooner or later the real police come and we all get arrested. And you know what, that’s fine by us. But if you let her go, then we let you go, and we all go back to our corners for the next round. Better for everyone. What do you say?”
“Next round?” I didn’t like the I-know-something-you-don’t in Anya’s voice. “There is no next round. The game is over. You lost.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“We’ve reprogrammed our Axons to filter out your override command. You can’t stop us now. The order has been given.”
I felt like my spine had turned to ice. Lisa and I exchanged a quick look. On one hand it was the worst possible news. On the other, they didn’t know about the master control signal, didn’t know that their Sophie could maybe still stop their attack.
“What do you think happens next, James?” Dmitri asked rhetorically. “I think the world will turn to what stability it can find. I think the voice of the Kremlin will become very persuasive. I think Dubai will be happy to extradite all of us back to Moscow.”
“Is that so,” Lisa said tautly.
“Who knows? We shall see.”
“No, we won’t, fucker, because you’ve just convinced me that the best thing to do right now is go back to plan A and blow up all five of you where you stand.”
An awkward silence followed.
“She’s right,” LoTek contributed. “We can’t let them have her.”
“No,” I said. “No, Lisa, no, you can’t -“
“Sorry,” Lisa said. “But she doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Wait!” Dmitri sounded scared now. “Wait. James. Let us discuss this.”
“They’re bluffing,” Anya said. “They wouldn’t -“
“I don’t bluff,” Lisa said, and it was impossible not to believe her. “There’s nothing to discuss. Sophie, I’m sorry, but I’m sure you understand, it’s necessary. The rest of you, see you in hell.”
“No,” I pleaded, “no, Lisa, don’t -“
“Sorry.”
“Wait!” Anya said desperately.
We waited.
“If we let her go, you’ll kill us anyway.”
“No, I won’t,” Lisa said. “Oh, I’ll want to, don’t get me wrong. But if you let her go I won’t have to. And I don’t kill people in cold blood unless I have to.”
Dmitri asked, “How can we believe that?”
“Look at it this way. Do it and you have a chance. Don’t, and you don’t.”
They spoke briefly and indecisively in Russian, then fell quiet.
Silent seconds crawled past. I stared at Lisa and wondered if she really meant to do it, and if so, how I could stop her. Obviously not by fighting her.
“You stay where you are,” she instructed me.
I looked at the launcher. Maybe if I got in the way of the drone -
“Fuck it,” Lisa said, “this is some kind of trick, and I don’t want to have to break James’s arms. You have five seconds. Four. Three. Two.”
“All right!” Anya cried out. “All right, we’ll do it.”
I exhaled with relief.
“Uncuff her first,” Lisa ordered. “And don’t you fucking try anything cute. If I have to kill us too to make sure you don’t get her, I fucking will, and if you don’t believe me, you go ahead and try.”
Five minutes later Sophie appeared, alone, on the other side of the freight elevator’s doors. She looked awfuclass="underline" scorched hair, torn clothes, cheeks stained with ashes and tears. I took her into my arms and held her wordlessly for a moment. The Russians watched nervously from the other corner of the roof.
“We could still take them out,” Lisa suggested. “If necessary.”
“No time,” Sophie said. Her voice was weak but angry. “They’re launching. I have to get back down to the clean room.”
“The clean room?” I didn’t understand. “I thought you needed some of their drones to experiment on to get the right signal, and then we’ll need to get you back to the hotel, and if they’ve already launched… ” My voice trailed off. It was already too late. It would take even Sophie hours to dissect the enemy drones and get what she needed to fix her control signal.
“I don’t need to waste time with hardware,” she said, “Their source code is down there. If I can get that onto my laptop I can figure out the right frequency in ten minutes. Hurry.”
Five minutes later we were in the clean room watching Sophie download their neural-network source code onto a thumb drive. Five more and we were outside the factory, sprinting towards the cluster of ambulances and fire trucks waiting at the gate.
The nearest vehicle was an ambulance with biohazard symbols painted besides its Red Crosses. We were rushed into its open doors, which were then slammed shut behind us with considerable violence. Our cover was still holding, and the police and firemen were still terrified of radiation and infection.
“We have to get to the Burj Al-Arab,” I ordered the driver, and ransacked my mind for any conceivable justification. When I came up blank I decided to resort to aggression instead of rationalization: “Don’t ask any questions. Just go.”
Danielle turned her head and grinned. “Why would I ask questions?”
The ambulance squealed forward while my mouth was still open with surprise.
Chapter 85
“Please tell me you brought the laptop with my test harness,” Sophie pleaded.
“Right here,” LoTek said from the passenger seat, and passed her her MacBook.
“Good. Danielle, slow down,” Sophie commanded as she fumbled with the thumb drive that contained the Russians’ source code.
“Sorry. No can do.”
“Slow down. In fact, stop, why are we driving anywhere? It’s hard to work when we’re in motion.” “Sophia,” Danielle said, “the Dubai police have already realized they’ve been used, and in only moments will connect that fact with this ambulance. We need to get as far away as we can, as fast as we can, or we’ll all be busted before you can so much as log in. So why don’t you shut the fuck up and let me drive?”
Sophie swallowed, nodded, stopped arguing, and started typing.
“What about the cell networks?” I asked.
“Working on it.” LoTek too sat hunched over his laptop, typing.
Seconds ticked past. We made a left-hand turn, and a bulky metal box in the corner rattled loudly. I recognized it from the hotel suite; the electromagnetic pulse cannon.
There were no windows in the sides of the ambulance but I could see from the Blade Runner-esque canyon of skyscrapers ahead of us that we were on Sheikh Zayed, the city’s main thoroughfare. The graceful arc of the Burj’s thousand-foot span was visible in the distance, dwarfed by less elegant spires.
“You’re not going to give me any bullshit about trading algorithm for access, are you?” Sophie demanded of LoTek without looking up. “Jesse died for this to succeed.”
“Jesse died to keep them from getting you,” he said sharply. “Not because his ideals ever wavered. I hope you’ll remember that.”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “I will.”
“You better. We can bargain later. Right now I just want to stop these fuckers.”
A klaxon yowled out of the silence, and through the small windows in the rear doors I saw the blue flashing lights of a police siren.
“Fuck,” Lisa said, echoing my own thoughts.
The car was soon joined by two others.
“Faster,” Lisa said grimly to Danielle.
“I’m driving as fast as I safely can.” Danielle sounded calm, almost meditative.
“Right, sure, safety first,” Sophie said sarcastically without looking up. “It’s not like the world as we know it is about to end.”