Tony smiled. “Gas-powered hogs are still legal down there.”
“Shit, that’s sweet. We take care of Cat, and then Brazil. Let’s liberate some equipment from the base. We need big machine guns.”
Forty minutes later, Slim and Tony headed north in a ten-seat armored personnel carrier. Tony drove, peering through the bulletproof windshield, while Slim tried to access their weapons. At seventy miles an hour, the road noise from eight all-terrain tires deafened them.
“Shit. You gotta have an implant. The damn system doesn’t have a manual mode.” Slim bashed his hand against the screen. “Two twenty-millimeter cannons and I can’t fire a freaking round.”
Tony looked at him. “Find the fuse box and shut down the computer. See what happens.”
Slim explored under the console, banging his head twice before he found a panel full of circuit breakers numbered one to forty-eight. He bit back the urge to yell. “Which one do I pull?”
“A thin one,” Tony said. “Anything fat is for the drive or weapons systems. Don’t touch those.”
Half the breakers were small. Tony started flipping, screens around the cabin dying one by one, until the weapon control system shut down. He tried the manual controls, and suddenly the guns responded. “Got it,” he called. He sighted on an approaching highway sign and fired. The green board and its support girders disintegrated and fell onto the road.
The armored vehicle slammed into the debris, bouncing over the metal pipes and into the pavement on the other side.
“Good job,” Tony called.
Slim grinned, showing brown-stained teeth. “Let’s find her now.”
57
As it neared five o’clock in New York, Madeleine Ridley terminated the call with Adam. She stared at the handheld for a minute; this was it. She’d worked with Adam for eight months, and with his help turned the People’s Party from a second-rate movement into a powerhouse. She still didn’t know who he was, just that he shared her hatred of AI and robots, and possessed influence and resources far beyond anything imaginable. Today she would make the ultimate sacrifice for the movement.
She finished her makeup with mascara and lip tint, and adjusted her dress. Going through her luggage for a last time, she made sure nothing tied the bag to her. It was a futile exercise, since forensic science had progressed to the point where capture was inevitable, but she had to try for her daughter Victoria.
Madeleine pulled out a plastic canister, cracked the safety tab on top, twisted the dial for a fifteen minute delay and a ten meter radius. She’d gotten the highly restricted decontamination spray from a Center for Disease Control employee who had passed her a box of the stuff at a lunchtime rendezvous arranged by Adam. The CDC used it for cleanup after tuberculosis-TES episodes, the deadly terrorist-engineered strain that required elimination of every biological cell. The nanites would eat everything, living or dead, within the programmed radius, the perfect solution to clearing the suite of DNA.
She flipped the Do Not Disturb switch, went down to Tim’s room and knocked. The camera indicator blinked on and Tim cracked the door. “Give me thirty seconds,” he said.
She waited as he activated his own decon canister, then they rode to the parking garage on the twentieth floor in silence. They got into the waiting car, programming the destination of a building on West Fifty-Eighth Street, outside the Secret Service’s restricted zone.
“You nervous?” Tim asked.
Madeleine shook her head. “I raised four children, two boys, two girls. If I could do that, I can do anything.”
She thought about Victoria, beautiful and smart, but so fragile. Devastated when she couldn’t get a job out of college, she’d fallen in with the wrong crowd and rotted her brain out with a cocktail of drugs that the neurologists at John Hopkins had shaken their heads at. Now she lived at home in an imaginary universe, her mind wrapped up in people and places and games that didn’t exist.
The guilt of leaving Victoria behind ate at her, but she needed to do something to protect the other children, the ones with their lives still ahead of them.
The government had let the AI and robots take over, and the next generation would have no meaningful jobs, careers or contributions. She saw it all around her: kids squatting in houses, no one working, trying one drug after another, living in virtual reality games. There was nothing left for them in the real world.
Madeleine sighed, depression reaching into the depths of her body and mind. The odds of coming home to take care of Victoria were minimal, but it was up to her to rein in the machines.
Manhattan skyscrapers grew larger, then passed by on either side of the aircar.
Lonnie Watson would be crushed. Betrayed by his number two, he might never recover from the political fallout. Poor Lonnie, complacent and naive, he thought the system could be changed from within.
Thank God for Adam, who’d understood her from the start, grasping that she didn’t have time to wait for politics. Her last medical diagnostic showed a rare brain tumor, and the machines said her cognition would go within a year. She’d even retested on different units, getting the same results. She needed to take action while she was able.
Adam appreciated all that, giving her guidance and resources and creating the plan to fulfill her goals.
With a small lurch, the aircar docked with the eighteenth floor of the tower. She and Tim waited at the elevator, then boarded with two additional members of the team, riding down together in uneasy silence.
Madeleine’s pulse raced. Less than ten blocks from the President of the United States, the Vice President, and former President Smith, they were about to change everything.
58
Cat drove closer than she thought she’d be able to, three hundred yards away from the geo-tag. A jumble of rocks filled the wash she’d been following, an insurmountable barrier to even the Fighter’s massive ground clearance.
She got out, forcing herself into the searing afternoon. At half past one o’clock it was nearly peak temperature for the desert, though the end was in sight and in another few hours the heat would back off. For now the air shimmered, sending the landscape through motion-sickness inducing waves, and when she put a hand on a boulder for leverage, it burned her.
A few minutes of hiking brought her to the two men. She checked the younger guy first, finding he matched the photos of Leon Tsarev plastered over the net. Lanky, blonde hair, rugged features. He’d be cute if not beet red, but she knew that from the pictures. His breath and pulse were shallow — she needed to get him inside and cooled off.
She walked over to the other man, who lay face down. She turned him onto his back, recognizing Mike Williams, whom she had learned about in elementary school. She sat with a thump as the energy drained out of her. Oh, God. The inventor of sentient AI was dead.
Cat’s hands shook, and she hugged her knees close to her as she rocked back and forth. She couldn’t afford to cry, didn’t have the moisture to spare.
The brilliant blue sky mocked her emotions. What a cruel fucking waste to die out here. She looked at the distance to the car, and came to a hard decision: the effort to carry a dead man would be too much, and she’d have to abandon him in the desert. He deserved respect, but keeping herself and Leon alive took precedence.
She squatted next to him, his open eyes staring into the heavens. She reached out to close them to leave him in a semblance of peace. Her fingers brushed his face, and she jumped as an electric shock traveled up her arm.