“I knew these people, Jon. This village. They were tough sons of bitches and they’d been going at it for centuries with the Taliban who wiped them out. Why did the balance of power suddenly shift?”
Smith considered that for a moment. “Okay…Let’s accept for a moment that this Afghan village somehow got hold of Merges before anyone in the developed world and someone is going to great lengths to hide it. Even if they were commercial versions, it should have been to their advantage. You’ve seen how effective they are.”
Her expression turned skeptical. “I talked to one of the Taliban who attacked them. He said that the women and children fought but the men didn’t. And one who was looking down the barrel of the gun said there was no God.”
“Sounds far-fetched, Randi. Maybe your Taliban friend was just trying to insult them after the fact — saying they were cowards with no faith.”
Again, she shook her head. “It wasn’t bravado. He was shaken by what happened in that village.”
Smith moved the head out of sight and leaned back in the booth again. When he looked at her, there was more than just a hint of accusation in her eyes.
“Any ideas, Jon?”
“I know what you’re thinking. That the military knew about this before the announcement and we were doing some kind of secret testing on the Afghans that we want covered up.”
“The truth is, I’ve known you a long time and I don’t think you’d get involved in something like that. But do you know who originally sent me out to Sarabat?”
“No.”
“Fred Klein. And I haven’t known him for a long time.”
Her caution was understandable. She hadn’t been working with Covert-One for long, and he’d displayed similar caution himself at first. Since then, though, Klein had proved himself over and over again.
“Here’s what I can tell you for certain: I don’t know anything about this. And here’s what I can tell you almost for certain: Neither does Fred or Montel Pedersen.”
She shrugged noncommittally. “Then what happened out there? What would make a group of people who come out of the womb fighting, and who have a piece of gear that even I acknowledge is a massive tactical advantage, stand there and get slaughtered? And why did Fred send me out there, then call me off before I went looking for the heads?”
“Maybe they weren’t what he was looking for, Randi. Fred keeps a lot of irons in the fire and even I don’t know about most of them. As far as the behavior of the people in that village goes, you know what an individual eyewitness account is worth. Maybe we should go talk to a few more of the Taliban who were involved and see if their stories match.”
“There are no more. They were wiped off the face of the earth a few days later by a bunch of mercs that no one seems to know anything about. Well, no one but Fred Klein.”
Smith took a hesitant pull from his beer. This just kept getting worse. “Drugs? Maybe gas? That could explain the strange behavior.”
“Far-fetched since it didn’t affect the women and children, but it was a possibility that occurred to me, too. That’s why I had an autopsy done.”
“And?”
“Clean.”
“So I’m guessing that you think they were connected to Merges during the attack and that’s what’s responsible for the unusual behavior.”
“They acted completely opposite of who they are and they had something attached to their brains that shouldn’t have been there. It seems like the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”
“That’s not the way it works, Randi.”
“Come on, who do you think you’re talking to? It hasn’t occurred to you that you could use that thing in the other direction? What about tDSC?”
The program that she was speaking of was the military’s experiment with sending a weak electrical current through the brain to enhance the ability to learn new skills. It was an incredibly promising technology that had already allowed them to double the rate of improvement in sharpshooters.
“Okay,” he admitted. “We’re playing around with a tDSC app. But I can do the same thing with a nine-volt battery and ten dollars’ worth of stuff from Home Depot. We’re not fundamentally changing someone’s personality. We’re just improving focus.”
“What about the sleep function everyone likes so much? That’s affecting the brain and you’re not doing it with a bagful of crap from the hardware store.”
“You’re just optimizing wave functions already built into your brain. And don’t forget that you have to be connected to a power source or you’d drain the battery in just a few minutes.”
She pushed her beer bottle around the table with her index finger. “I don’t know what worries me more, Jon. That you’re lying to me, or that you’re telling the truth and the head of Merge development for the armed forces doesn’t know anything about this.”
It was a fair observation. “Let me do some quiet asking around.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, bringing her lips to her bottle again. “You do that.”
30
“Morning,” Smith mumbled as he stepped into Covert-One’s inner offices. He’d been up all night working and didn’t bounce back from sleeplessness like he had in his twenties. Of course, he could use his Merge to knock him out at six o’clock tonight and be good as new by morning, but now he felt a little hesitant.
“Everything all right?” Maggie said, peeking out from behind the monitors she was barricaded behind.
He’d caught up with Klein on an encrypted line late last night and it was likely that she hadn’t yet been briefed on the conversation. Maggie was the only other person who knew the full extent of the Covert-One operation and she wasn’t accustomed to being in the dark.
“Yeah. Randi’s got a burr under her saddle…”
“Nothing new there.”
He laughed. After years of dancing around, Randi had been brought into the C1 fold only recently. And while she’d already proved her value ten times over, neither Maggie nor Klein had completely figured out how to deal with her. When they did, hopefully they’d teach him.
“It’s one of those things that’ll probably turn out to be nothing.”
“But you’re not a hundred percent sure.”
“Exactly.”
She retreated behind her monitors. “Go on in.”
Klein was on the phone when Smith entered, so he just fell into a chair and looked around at the old maps decorating the walls.
“So nothing at all. You’re telling me straight, right, JC?”
Smith perked up at the initials. It was what close friends called the director of the CIA.
“…No, no reason,” Klein continued. “Okay. Maybe next week? Give me a call.”
He hung up the phone and immediately went for his pipe.
“Any whispers?” Smith said.
“Nothing at all. In fact, the silence is deafening. No one seems to know anything about this.”
“And you think they’re telling the truth?”
Klein couldn’t reveal the existence of Covert-One or his working relationship with the president, so he had no authority beyond his history and reputation. And while both carried a fair amount of weight, they didn’t preclude the possibility that he was being kept out of the loop.
“I’d say I’m seventy-five percent confident that no one in the intelligence community knows anything about the Merge being used in Afghanistan prior to its release — or even that it existed before Dresner’s unveiling.”
The skepticism was not only audible in his voice, but clearly visible in his face. And it wasn’t hard to guess why.
“Randi…” Smith said.
Klein’s pipe finally caught and he gave it a few hard pulls. “We both know she has a way of grabbing hold of things she can’t let go of. And that she’s a bit of a technophobe.”