“Ardbeg 1975. A gift from the Thai ambassador.”
“Is Cassie still out of the country?”
“Touring sugar plantations and eating too much island food. That’s the job you want, Fred. First Lady.”
Castilla was a brilliant man with an honest streak much wider than most and a reassuring aura of calm that tended to slip when his wife was gone for long periods of time. With so few people he trusted implicitly, he liked to keep them close.
“I’m not sure I’m qualified.”
Castilla grinned and drained his beer, pulling another from a dignified-looking oak chest that had been converted to hold ice. “These days it’s hard not to start looking forward to building my library, writing a self-serving autobiography, and hitting golf balls. What do you think, Fred? Will you be ready to join me in the pasture when my term’s up?”
“I don’t play golf,” he responded, evading the question.
Castilla let him get away with it. “I assume you aren’t here to make sure I’m eating right while my wife is gone. What do you have for me?”
Klein pulled a tablet computer from his portfolio and punched in a password, bringing up a photo of the severed head Randi Russell had found. Castilla looked at it, blanched visibly, and then went back to working on his beer.
“Someone I know?”
“An Afghan from a rural village called Sarabat. Did you see the places on the skull that were circled?”
Castilla nodded. “Dresner’s Merge is getting around. We originally thought that Islam’s prohibitions against body modification would pretty much shut down adoption in that part of the world, but the effect hasn’t been as strong as we thought. Hats off to Dresner’s marketing director.”
“There’s more.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“It appears that the studs in this man’s skull were installed more than four months ago.”
Castilla’s eyes narrowed as he made a few mental calculations. “That was before the Merge was released. Well before.”
“That’s right.”
“Where did you get this, Fred? Is the intel solid?”
“I had Randi Russell looking into a lead on the Pentagon issue. This just fell in her lap. And while I haven’t been working directly with her for long, I have a great deal of admiration for her. Also, Jon Smith has corroborated most of her story. I think you and I hold the same opinion of Jon.”
“This really isn’t what I needed today.”
“Sorry, Sam.”
“What else do we know?”
“Basically nothing. And that’s why I’m here. I need some direction from you as to whether this is something Covert-One should pursue.”
“Hell yes, it’s something you should pursue. Why wouldn’t—” He caught himself and fell silent for a moment. “You think I had something to do with this.”
“I’m not here to pass judgment, Sam. You know that. But if this is a government-run test I’m not aware of, it’d be better if we steer clear of it.”
“I found out about the Merge the same time the rest of the world did and I found out about the military version the same way you did — from Smith’s meeting with Craig Bailer. After I got his report, I met with the CIA and Joint Chiefs to discuss it. They didn’t know any more than I did.”
“Okay,” Klein said in a measured tone. “Then the question we need to answer is how this should be handled. It might make sense to hand it over to the CIA and military intelligence. Keep us out of it.”
Castilla settled back in the sofa and stared silently down at the beer in his hand. With Covert-One’s involvement always came the risk of exposure.
“I’m telling you straight that I didn’t know anything about this, Fred. But there’s no guarantee that someone in the military or intelligence community didn’t find out before me and decide to do a quiet trial.”
Klein nodded. It was a possibility that he himself had considered. Sometimes things had to be done that the country’s politicians didn’t want or need to know about.
“If that’s the case,” Castilla continued. “I have two problems. First, I can’t trust the CIA or military to look into this. And second, if it turns out that one of those organizations was involved, I don’t need a leak before I make a decision about what to do.”
“So what I’m hearing is that we should pursue this.”
The president nodded. “But we’re just gathering information at this point. No action is to be taken without my direct authorization.”
33
Jon Smith eased up on the accelerator and gave in to his compulsion to confirm on his iPhone that he was still on the right road. He wasn’t sure why, though. The asphalt in front of him glowed dim yellow and a translucent ETA floated in his peripheral vision. One of the strange things about the Merge was that the more accustomed you got to it, the more it faded into the background. Sometimes it was easy to forget it was even there.
The mist was getting worse, hanging in the trees and threatening to condense into rain. The men he was on his way to meet were probably gleefully praying for a deluge — anything to increase the morning’s suffering.
Smith had been tagging along with a group of former and current special forces operatives on their weekend trail run for years now. The terrain was always brutal, the pace superhuman, and the competitiveness on the verge of psychotic.
Two and a half hours of misery that he’d hoped to avoid by retreating to Nevada, but now his return had been delayed by Klein’s green light. There were no excuses — no kids’ birthdays, sick parents, or flooded basements. Even injuries better be backed up with an ugly, emailed X-ray. If you were in town, you showed up.
He flipped off the radio and his thoughts immediately turned to Randi’s discovery and what the hell he was going to do about it.
Dresner was the obvious place to start, but access to the great man was extremely limited and U.S. leverage against him virtually non-existent.
Of course, there was Afghanistan, but that would probably turn out to be an even bigger dead end. The locals in question were all in the ground and the region wasn’t exactly known for its meticulous record keeping.
Maybe the mercs who had wiped out Kot’eh? Sure, he might be able to find them, but what were they going to say? In all likelihood they had no idea who’d hired them. As long as the price was right, they tended not to worry about those kinds of details.
That left the technology itself. While he was far from convinced that the Afghans’ reported odd behavior had anything to do with the Merge — or for that matter even existed — it was an intriguing theory. His team had been so focused on exploiting the Merge’s hundreds of obvious capabilities, they hadn’t had much time to investigate what they didn’t know about it.
How was it developed? The human brain was the most complicated thing in the known universe and notoriously difficult to model. Massive testing must have been done but no one thought about that any more than they thought about how their new phone was developed. Was it possible that Dresner had decided to test the military unit in a war zone? Again, doubtful, but not completely out of the question. If the man was anything, he was thorough.
And what about Christian Dresner? Smith had read everything the government and media had on him, which wasn’t much. Why would it be? Digging through the trash cans and hacked phones of supermodels and movies stars was a hell of a lot more interesting than putting a microscope on a sixty-odd-year-old recluse who went around trying to make the world a better place. While admittedly intimidating, Dresner slotted in on the sinister scale somewhere between a baby seal and ice cream.