Jon Evans

Swarm

Part 1. Unmanned

Chapter 1

Into the belly of the beast, I thought.

The airplane looming above us in the red light of the setting sun had a bulbous body like a whale, with high and oddly twisted wings. A truck could have driven up its rear ramp and into its cavernous hold. It occurred to me that twenty-five years ago, when I was a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, I had watched the space shuttle land on the very runway that stretched into the formless desert beyond the plane.

Edwards Air Force Base around us was the size of a small town, but the empty wasteland that surrounded it made it seem fragile and impermanent, as if a divine wind might at any moment rise and sweep everything manmade into the endless annihilation of the desert. I had never been on any military base before and everything seemed strange and surreal. I felt both exhausted and wired, like I was being kept awake by amphetamines. It was hard to believe that this was actually happening, that I was really in this bustling martial hive, waiting to board the airplane that would take me to fearsome Colombia.

I looked over to Sophie. She was the real reason we were here; I was, as usual, an afterthought, her plus-one. She grinned at me excitedly. A week earlier, I would have returned that grin with interest. Instead I forced a fake smile and looked away, a dull knife twisting in my guts.

The interior of the cargo plane was an enormous tubular cave, its metal walls bristling with racks and tools, its ceiling covered by lights, ducts, wires, crawl spaces and access platforms. Its hold was full of boats. Their inverted hulls looked like thirty-foot long pistachio shells, held in place by a complex web of straps like giant seat belts.

“Coast and river interdiction,” Reyes explained, noting my perplexed look. “We give the Colombians a lot of hardware. For all the good it does.”

It was Lisa Reyes who had brought us here. She was a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and looked the part: lean and wiry with muscle, wearing a dark suit, with high cheekbones, a sharp chin, unnaturally red hair, and a nose that had been broken at least once. She stood and moved like an athlete, perfectly balanced, coiled for action. Between her physical presence and her profession I felt uncomfortably like I was standing beside a feral animal.

When Reyes had appeared in our lab earlier that morning and introduced herself, I had briefly been terrified that she had come to arrest us. Sophie and I occasionally partook of party drugs. But it was something else that had brought her, something far more serious and mysterious: a triple homicide. The murder of DEA agent Michael Kostopolous and two Colombian government officials, in Bogota, in broad daylight, while driving at high speed. A death from above.

Michael Kostopoulos. When I had first heard Reyes pronounce his name, I had thought for a moment that I was dreaming.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. There seemed no reason not to proceed up the ramp, but the uniformed men ahead of us had made no move. I was dressed for Pasadena, not the high desert, and as the sun set the night air was growing teeth.

Reyes shrugged resignedly and pitched her voice to carry. “Hurry up and wait. That’s the Air Force way. If any of these flyboys ever actually did anything in an expeditious manner, they’d get in trouble for making all the rest of them look bad.”

“I heard that,” said one of the men ahead of us, turning to give her a look. He was tall, with charcoal-coloured skin and the name OKOCHA emblazoned opposite AIR FORCE on his jungle-camouflaged chest. I didn’t know exactly what his shoulder badges signified, but they looked impressive.

She smiled at him sweetly. “Oh dear, was that my outside voice?”

“Reyes,” the other Air Force officer said – Harrison, stout and grey-haired – “you’re lucky there are civilians on this flight, or we’d have you field-test our new FYAUYF emergency deplaning system.”

“FYAUYF?”

“Flap your arms until you fly.”

“Probably be a softer landing than the last one you gave me.”

Okocha grunted. “Don’t get fussy. Any landing you walk away from, that’s a good landing.”

Another Air Force man appeared atop the ramp and waved us up. We ascended, and he took our boarding passes. They looked just like the ones for commercial flights. I supposed the military had to keep track of passengers too.

His eyes narrowed when he saw Sophie’s pass and mine. “James Kowalski,” he read aloud. “Sophie Warren. What outfit are you with?”

I shrugged uncertainly and looked at Reyes, who explained, “Civilians.”

“You’re taking civilians to Colombia?”

“It’s all right,” she said, “they’re with me.”

He looked at her skeptically, then to Harrison and Okocha for confirmation, before shrugging, acquiescing, and motioning us onwards.

“Don’t worry,” Reyes assured us for the third time, “you’ll be perfectly safe.”

We proceeded towards the nose of the plane, to where a row of seats folded down from the walls. I sat beneath an axe mounted beside a sign that said For Emergency Exit Cut Here, and fastened my seat belt. The orange earplugs Harrison gave me seemed to make the whole world grow more distant, intensified the feeling that I was dreaming or hallucinating. Only twelve hours ago I had expected to spend tonight watching a movie.

I started when the airplane began to move. So did Sophie, sitting beside me. The few tiny portholes were mounted too high to see anything but sky. The noise when the engines throttled up was overwhelming even through the earplugs, and the sideways acceleration as we hurtled across the desert felt odd and uncomfortable. Sophie took my hand and gripped it tightly. She didn’t like flying at the best of times. She didn’t like not being in control.

Then we lifted off, and were skyborne; en route, incredibly, to Colombia.

With her eyes closed against fear Sophie looked even younger than she was. Reyes had been visibly skeptical when Sophie was introduced to her as Dr. Warren. Twenty-five years old, with her hair ponytailed and a spray of freckles around her upturned nose, wearing old jeans and an XKCD T-shirt, she looked more like an intern than an associate professor of engineering with her own Caltech research laboratory.

We were in the belly of a military jet headed for Bogota because the DEA had requested Sophie’s expert technical knowledge and advice regarding the extraordinary means by which Michael Kostopoulous and his Colombian counterparts had been murdered. Or at least that’s what everyone other than Sophie and I thought. And if Lisa Reyes had come to us a week earlier, I would have figured the same.

Now, though, I thought differently.

Chapter 2

I was glad that the engine noise precluded speech at anything below a scream. Just then talking to Sophie was the last thing I wanted to do. Instead I let my exhaustion rise within me and consume me like an all-enveloping cloud of smoke.

When we finally landed I was asleep on a pile of life jackets, wrapped in a blanket Okocha had found somewhere. I stumbled dazed and bleary to my feet. According to my iPhone it was 4AM, Colombia time. We lined up inside the rear gate, only to discover that it had jammed shut.

“Remember,” Reyes said drily as the crew chief fiddled with the controls, “we’re the superpower.”

After about ten minutes the gate finally descended, revealing another runway and another airbase. The only indications that we had entered a new country were that all the signs were in Spanish and everything was shabbier. Some of the buildings and vehicles hadn’t been painted in months, and the roads were marred with cracks and stubborn patches of grass. But the soldiers who greeted us looked tough and well-equipped.

The air outside was damp and the breeze much colder than I had expected. Reyes spoke to the Colombians in effortless Spanish. Someone gave me a small plastic cup full of sweet black coffee, which I drank gratefully, before we were escorted into a long, low hangar-like building, to a whitewashed room dominated by a large steel table. It reminded me uncomfortably of morgue scenes in movies.

Laid out on the table were the shattered metal and plastic remains of some machine, charred and warped by heat and force. Few shards were bigger than a finger.

The man standing beside the table was plump and middle-aged, wearing a military uniform, with sharp eyes above a graying moustache. “Martinez, Colombian Air Force,” he introduced himself, in near-fluent English. He looked at me, the only man there not in uniform. “You are the engineering expert?”

I indicated Sophie. “More her than me.”

He looked at her skeptically. She was already too engrossed by the wreckage to notice. “This is what’s left of the UAV that hit Kostopoulos?” she asked.

I twitched; it was the first time I had heard her say that name.

Martinez nodded slowly. “A flying bomb. There were several witnesses, nearby cars, unhurt except for broken glass. They said it struck the target vehicle directly and exploded on contact. Narco-terrorists, obviously, but which faction, the FARC or the paramilitaries or the international cartels, that we do not know. Our hope is for you to find a clue that will lead us to who sent it.”

“Then you’re wasting your time,” Sophie said briskly. “I might be able to work out who built it, but you’ll never be able to prove who actually dispatched it unless they’re supremely stupid, and if they were stupid they wouldn’t have used a drone. I don’t like your analogy. Not a flying bomb. Bombs are dumb. More like a small cruise missile. You know who committed your homicide? Someone who typed a command into a computer. They could have been time zones away.”

“They must have targeted them somehow. We think it was most likely laser-guided.”

She shook her head. “I imagine it homed in on a radio signal.”

“No. If they had planted a transmitter in the vehicle we would have found its remains.”

“Why plant anything? They had cell phones, didn’t they?”

Martinez looked blank for a moment. Then his face went slack with sudden understanding.

“Mobile phones broadcast their unique IDs frequently,” Sophie said, enjoying his reaction. Talking down to important authorities was one of her favourite pastimes. “That’s how they find new cell towers. With a drone capable of targeting that signal after them, they might as well have been shouting ‘come get me.’”

“Their phones. Their phones.” Martinez shook his head wonderingly as he considered the ramifications. “If you’re right, someone with a weapon like that, a drone, they could take out anyone with a cell phone. Generals, presidents, anyone.”

“Sure. Pick your target, harvest their phone’s ID, send up a drone, get it into signal range, and let it do its thing. Circle, triangulate, spiral in. Boom. The perfect assassination. Death from above, undetectable, unstoppable, untraceable.” She sounded vaguely pleased by the notion of such murderous elegance. “I could be wrong. But that’s how I would have done it.”

Martinez looked appalled. I sympathized. If Sophie was right, no one was safe.

Chapter 3

“How hard would it be to build that kind of drone?” Reyes asked.

“You wouldn’t,” Sophie said. “You’d buy it. Research UAVs go for about fifty thousand dollars nowadays. Range of several hundred miles, used for all kinds of purposes. Swap out the camera for some radio gear and control circuitry, you’d still have a ten-pound payload if you sacrificed some distance. I’m no explosives expert, but that sounds like more than enough. The hardware is trivial.” She paused. “But the software, that’s another story. Real-time, real-world aerial maneuvering, triangulating on a signal, those are hard problems. Where were they hit? In an urban environment?”

“On the highway,” Martinez said.

“Not surprising. Too many complexities in a city. But even in the open it wouldn’t be easy, especially if he was in motion. You can buy a UAV off the shelf, more or less, but they don’t exactly sell real-time targeting software at Best Buy.”

“Then where would you get it?” Reyes asked.

“Well… it’s one of the things we do at our lab,” Sophie admitted. “Not homing in on cell phones specifically, but our nets support multiple targeting heuristics. About half a dozen other university labs around the world might have a similar capability. I can give you all the names, it’s a small field, everyone knows everyone. Maybe the same number of private facilities, aerospace companies. And I’m sure military, too, but you’d know more about that than us.”

“So maybe twenty different organizations could have created this thing?” Harrison said incredulously.

Sophie nodded cheerfully. “At least. Two years ago it was more like zero. The inexorable march of technology. I may not find any clues, but I can guarantee you one thing, Michael Kostopoulos will not be the last victim of a drone assassination.”

An unpleasant hush fell.

“This isn’t off-the-shelf hardware,” I said. That was my remit; my job at the lab was to build and test the UAVs that hosted Sophie’s software. I donned latex gloves and picked up the largest surviving piece, a wingtip. It was remarkably light, and non-metallic. “Carbon fibre?”

Martinez looked at me warily. “How can you tell? Our forensics team needed microscopes.”

“Just a guess. Same thing they use to make airliners nowadays. Very strong, very light, very expensive.”

“Speaking of microscopes,” Sophie said, balancing what looked like a tiny golden flake on her latex-clad fingertip, “I need one for this.”

Martinez made a call. Soon a uniformed Colombian girl who looked about eighteen brought a microscope. Sophie studied the fragment of microchip with great interest for some time.

Finally she lifted her head and looked straight at me. “Hard to tell for sure, but it looks like it used to be an FPGA connected to some custom analog circuitry.”

I grunted with recognition.

“Which means what exactly?” Reyes asked impatiently.

Sophie returned to the microscope. I tried to find an answer that might make sense to a non-techie. “An FPGA is basically a reprogrammable computer chip. Slower than the kind in your computer, but you can reconfigure it completely on the fly.”

“Or it can reconfigure itself,” Sophie added without looking up.

Reyes visibly decided she didn’t care about the technical details. “So who uses these kinds of chips? Are they common?”

I shook my head. “No. FPGA plus custom analog for control chips, there are maybe three labs in the world doing that kind of research. Redekopp at MIT, Almasry in Cambridge… ” I hesitated, looked over at Sophie.

“And us,” she said mildly, still absorbed in the microscope. “And we’re the only ones using them to control UAVs.”

“Just a minute.” Okocha sounded startled. “Are you saying this came from your lab?”

“No. This isn’t one of ours. Different substrate. But it looks a lot like my work. I’m almost sure it used to be a neural network.”

Sophie stood and stretched. Her powerful brain was trapped in a fragile body: she suffered back spasms sometimes, and doubling over for an extended period like she had at the microscope wasn’t good for her. She had bad lungs, too, and the air here was damp and dusty. I gave her a concerned look and was relieved by the quick head-shake that indicated she was fine.

“What’s a neural network?” Harrison asked.

“A computer built like a brain,” I oversimplified. “Better than traditional software at pattern recognition and other kinds of artificial intelligence. But you can’t program them like other computers. You have to teach them and let them evolve.”

Reyes looked at me like I should wash my mouth out with soap for telling such baldfaced lies. Okocha looked very grave. Harrison seemed to feel this was all a waste of time. I felt a little guilty at being the bearer of complicated news, and decided not to brag that Sophie was arguably the world’s foremost expert on the subject of neural networks. Instead I looked back at the charred debris on the metal table.

Something familiar caught my eye. I picked up a small and ragged rectangle of white plastic, about a half inch by a quarter inch. A smeared and shining blob of what might once have been copper circuitry was faintly visible. The perimeter had maintained enough of its shape to show that a clean diagonal notch had once been cut across one of its corners.

“This looks like a SIM card,” I said. “From a cell phone.”

“Not from the victims,” Martinez looked interested. “Their phones were mostly intact. You think maybe they planted another one? For targeting?”

I shook my head. “I bet they built a phone into the drone. Then they could control it remotely anywhere there’s a cell network.”

“Control it how?”

“Maybe some homegrown text-message protocol,” I guessed. “That might be something you could track. But I imagine they covered their trail. It isn’t hard to get anonymous prepaid SIM cards.”

“Let me get this straight.” Reyes sounded like she thought I was making this all up. “Kostopoulous was murdered by a flying bomb, triggered by a built-in cell phone, and if I understand you correctly, controlled by an artificial intelligence? Did I just walk into a bad sci-fi movie?”

“A very stupid artificial intelligence,” I said defensively. “Like an insect brain. Not really that much smarter than a Roomba. It can fly and navigate, but that’s about it. It’s actually all old hardware. Smaller and faster than it used to be, but neural nets are decades old, and the military’s been using UAVs for more than ten years now. What’s new is the software.”

“Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Sophie sounded amused. “May you live in interesting times.”

“Thanks so much,” Reyes said sardonically. “Just for future reference, us law enforcement types like our times as boring as possible.”

“You said it looked like your work,” Okocha said. “How much like your work?”

Sophie shrugged. “Just in broad outlines. Literally. As in the way the chip is laid out. It’s too damaged to make out any details. Where’s the other drone you’ve got? The mostly intact one? We’ll learn a lot more from it.”

Everyone looked at Martinez.

“Ah,” he said uncomfortably. “Regarding the other drone. There exists a small logistical difficulty. It crashed in the north, in the jungles near Santa Marta, where it was found and reported to the police by a campesino.”

“Peasant farmer,” Reyes translated.

“Now the interior ministry -” He shrugged awkwardly. “They say the drone is theirs, and they will not allow it to be brought back to Bogota until they receive guarantees that they will maintain jurisdiction.”

After a moment Reyes chuckled bitterly, and indicated the wreckage on the table. “Just like how you guys wouldn’t let us bring this to the USA. Don’t it just suck to be hoist on your own petard? So now we’re stuck using high-school microscopes to analyze this, and you can’t actually show us the drone that hasn’t blown up. This would be fucking hilarious if friends of mine weren’t busy dying while you guys sorted out your bureaucratic clusterfucks.”

I supposed she meant Kostopoulos. I hadn’t realized they were friends.

“I did not say we cannot show you the other drone,” Martinez said, stung. “We can. But you will have to go to it.”

“Where?”

“At the moment it is being kept near where it was discovered.”

“In the jungle?” Okocha asked, incredulously.

Martinez nodded curtly.

Reyes switched to Spanish, in which she and Martinez exchanged what sounded like angry epithets before she turned to the rest of us, shrugged, and said, “Apparently there’s a Blackhawk ready to take us right now.”

Harrison rolled his eyes. Okocha sighed. Like Reyes, they seemed to accept this new journey as an irritating but acceptable complication. I was not quite so sanguine. It was one thing to be brought to an airbase near the capital city, quite another to be taken into trackless jungle populated by heavily armed rebel armies and cocaine cartels. Sophie looked uncertain too.

“Don’t worry,” Reyes told us. “The area’s been secured. We’ll have an escort of elite soldiers. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

Chapter 4

The sleek helicopter loomed almost invisibly against the night. Inside everything was painted black. There wasn’t quite enough room to stand. The seats were made of canvas and metal pipe. Once all thirteen passengers were aboard and strapped in – me, Sophie, Reyes, Okocha, Harrison, and eight hard-faced Colombian soldiers with assault rifles – the doors slid shut, the engine roared to life beneath us, and the rotors began to turn, slowly at first, but soon blurring into invisibility. The noise was so loud I suspected only my earplugs were saving me from permanent hearing damage.

Sophie gripped my hand hard enough to leave fingernail bruises as the ground fell away smoothly, like riding an elevator. To the east dawn pearled behind a huge city backdropped by green-clad mountains. Bogota, I supposed. Traffic lights winked like fireflies. We rose as high as its tallest skyscrapers. It was strange and thrilling to be an integral part of an international military operation. I felt a little like a weekend hockey player accidentally promoted to the NHL.

The helicopter raced north along a muddy river, across a huge savannah carved into a checkerboard of farmland and pasture, over little towns just beginning to wake, until we reached the edge of the country’s vast central plateau and descended towards the lowland. Here civilization was interspersed with vast swathes of unbroken green jungle. The ride was amazingly smooth.

I looked over at Sophie. She released my hand and forced a smile. I did the same, and looked away again.

It was so hard to believe that she was deceiving me. When we were alone together Sophie was mostly wonderful, sweet and playful, capable of an infectious and childlike joy in the world. She could be patronizing and dismissive, but she was, after all, much smarter than me, and she tried to check those instincts. She told me often that she needed me, that I was her anchor, her rock. Only three days ago I would have said she had never been dishonest to me about anything.

As was so often the case, it was the coverup rather than the actual transgression which had betrayed her. I would never have suspected anything had I not discovered, while using her Mac for some video editing, that she was using the Tor anonymous proxy service to prevent her Internet usage from being tracked to her computer.

My curiosity piqued, I had examined the traces her web browsing had left on her computer. I was no genius, but I was a capable computer engineer, with a degree from Canada’s most prestigious technical school; and I found that she had been accessing Yahoo! Mail. We had been dating for three years, living and working together for two, and she had never mentioned any such account.

So I installed a packet sniffer on our network. An electronic spy that let me read copies of all the unencrypted data she sent and received. It was an awful thing to have done, and I wasn’t proud of it. But on some level I had already known that she was hiding something from me, had long suffered from a never-admitted sense of exclusion, a nagging feeling that despite sharing Sophie’s life for three years, I still didn’t really know her and never would. She was keeping from me some secret core.

Two days before Lisa Reyes came to our lab, I discovered that Sophie had accessed and reread this message, sent three days earlier:

From: mk2012@yahoo.com

To: swalamode@yahoo.com

Date: Thu 12 Mar 2010 13:11 EST

Subject: confirmation

I’ve made arrangements to be in Los Angeles on the 21st. Meet me at the Cadillac Hotel on Venice Beach at 6PM. I’ll be checked in as “George Mamatas.” Come straight to my room.

Looking forward to it with great anticipation.

Michael Kostopoulos

When I read that I thought for a few seconds that I might actually throw up. Michael Kostopoulous. I imagined him as tall, dark and handsome, an oily and charming jet-setter, maybe the heir to a shipping fortune, no doubt ferociously good in bed. For two long days every time I looked at her I found myself wondering what she might do with him that she didn’t with me.

How wrong I had been. I should have known right away that Sophie would have no truck with something as small and tawdry as an affair. If she wasn’t happy in our relationship, she would have just dumped me, or sat me down and told me she wanted to try polyamory. Whatever she was hiding was something far more extraordinary than mere infidelity.

Assassinations. Drug cartels. How could Sophie be involved with such things? What could she possibly be hiding that had intertwined her with murder? And why keep it from me? To protect me?

I wondered when it had begun, how long she had been deceiving me. Weeks? Months? Since that day three years ago that Jesse – our lab’s biggest client, and my high-school best friend – had first introduced us?

I wondered when I should confront her. I knew there would never be a good time, but I wanted to unearth some more answers myself first. Otherwise I wouldn’t know if whatever she told me was the whole truth.

A moot point, right now; we probably wouldn’t be alone together again until after we got back from Colombia. Until then all I could do was speculate and seethe.

I closed my eyes. The overwhelming noise of the helicopter was oddly soporific, and I soon fell asleep again. When I woke I reopened my eyes to a surreally beautiful vista of snow-capped peaks rising from the trackless jungle, glittering in the new day’s sunlight, and beyond, an uninterrupted line of blue that had to be the Caribbean. I felt like I was still dreaming. It didn’t seem possible that only sixteen hours ago I had been in Pasadena.

We veered away from the red dirt road we had followed and flew for maybe twenty miles over wild hill country, jagged ridges and valleys covered with raw jungle, laced with plunging waterfalls and whitewater rivers. I took several pictures with my iPhone. The last shot included a tiny silver dot in one corner, which swelled as we approached into a tin-roofed building. As we neared it the timbre of the engine changed, and we descended towards that lonely structure.

It was a one-room school, like something out of Little House on the Prairie, with windowed concrete walls, a tin roof, and the alphabet painted in bright colours on the interior wall. Absurdly young soldiers with ragged uniforms and well-worn rifles guarded the door and milled on the edges of the soccer field where the helicopter landed, the only cleared ground for twenty miles. A single muddy path ran from the school past one set of goalposts before disappearing into primeval jungle. When we disembarked the rotor wind was so strong I stumbled and almost fell.

The UAV we had been brought so far to see was inside the school, on the teacher’s desk.

It looked worryingly familiar.

Chapter 5

The damaged drone was spindly and insectile. Its bulbously cylindrical body, about two feet long and the color of gunmetal, hung from wings that were a single six-foot blade shaped like a narrow Japanese fan. A ten-inch-long nose spike protruded from its nose, and a single propeller was mounted at its tail. Two struts extended back from the wing to support an inverted-V tailfin behind the propeller. The right wingtip and tailfin had buckled and warped from some impact, but the rest looked sleek, streamlined, intact.

While Martinez and Reyes spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to the man who appeared to be in charge of the site, Sophie and I examined it drone more closely. A narrow solar panel ran the length of its wing. I supposed the nose-spike was its radio antenna. There was a tiny camera lens at its tip, and another set like a navel in its belly. The body was divided into three components, each covered by user-accessible panels: fuel cell, avionics, and payload, was my guess. The third compartment was open, and empty but for two severed, dangling wires. I supposed, or at least devoutly hoped, that the Colombians had removed the drone’s explosive cargo.

I looked for a part number or familiar component, anything that might identify its provenance, and found nothing. As I did so, a tiny LED bulb set into the body, beside its belly camera, flashed blood red.

Both Sophie and I started at this evidence that the drone was still active.

“Is there any GSM signal here?” Sophie demanded.

Martinez stiffened as he understood, and flipped open his phone with alacrity before relief settled onto his face. “No. Nothing.”

Sophie relaxed. “Bureaucratic inefficiency for the win, for once. Good thing you didn’t bring this somewhere with coverage. Probably has an onboard GPS locator, it’d have told whoever sent it exactly where it was. This isn’t just a weapon. It’s a node of an enemy network.”

Martinez nodded thoughtfully, impressed.

Sophie began to open the other panels, looking for the UAV’s brain. Soldiers peered in through the windows, curious. A big blue dragonfly buzzed through the doorway and began to circle the naked lightbulb hanging in the center of the room.

I said, “It looks expensive.”

“The narcos make billions of dollars every year,” Martinez said. “They can buy whatever they want.”

I didn’t tell him that it also looked an awful lot like the UAVs our lab had designed and built for Convoy, Jesse’s company. Those drones were smaller and cheaper, built of aluminum and fibreglass instead of titanium and carbon fibre, but they had the same general design – and they were controlled by neural networks that Sophie had designed and trained.

The Convoy Emerging Wealth Fund. That name was Jesse’s idea of a joke; the wealth in question was supposed to emerge from the sea. It was a treasure-hunting startup using a network of aerial and underwater drones to look for sunken galleons in the Caribbean. Jesse had never identified the “consortium of investors” who funded him, but they were well-heeled. Just last week he had wired us three million dollars.

Could a drug cartel be using Convoy as a front to purchase Sophie’s neural networks? It sounded almost plausible… except Jesse would never be involved in something like that. I had known him almost twenty years and I was sure of that much. He was a government-hating libertarian, he thought drugs should be legalized, but that didn’t mean he’d work for a murderous cocaine cartel. And his drive to find lost galleons was genuine. He had been fascinated by the Caribbean’s sunken treasure since high school.

But maybe he didn’t even know, maybe someone else at Convoy was responsible. I thought of his Russian girlfriend, Anya. I didn’t know much about her, except that she knew an awful lot about computers for a woman who wore miniskirts and stiletto heels to business meetings, but I knew she had introduced him to Convoy’s investors. Could she be a stalking horse for a drug cartel? It sounded incredible, but not impossible. And it would explain almost everything.

Except the secret connection between Sophie and the late Michael Kostopoulos.

I was startled out of my reverie by an unexpected noise: a keening whine, high in the sky. Like something you might hear at a fireworks display. I looked around, puzzled. The others seemed equally startled.

Another whine joined the first, and then another, forming a dissonant chord.

“Oh shit,” I heard Reyes say, in a hoarse, ragged voice, “those are mortars -“

Then there was a bright flash outside, accompanied by the loudest noise in the world, and all the windows shattered. A shockwave laced with broken glass knocked me off my feet, and as I fell the back of my head hit the corner of a desk so hard that the whole world blurred into darkness.

Chapter 6

I lay stunned but not unconscious. My eyes were open, but all was darkness. My first thought was that someone had turned out all the lights. I was vaguely aware of two more explosions tearing through the air, more distant than the first, followed by a fusillade of faint popping noises. All sounds seemed limp and filtered, as if I was still wearing the earplugs I had removed before entering the school.

I don’t know how long I lay there dazed and blind and half-deaf. Time seemed to have lost all direction. It was probably less than a minute before the taste of blood startled me out of that haze. I touched my hand to my face instinctively and found my cheek wet and deformed by a sharp irregularity, a small shard of broken glass. Without thinking I pulled it out. It didn’t hurt. The adrenaline coursing through me left no room for any pain.

With terror I touched my fingertips to my eyes, but they seemed untouched. Then I remembered that I had struck the back of my head, home of the optic nerve. When I touched that impact site gingerly my hand came away wet with more blood, but as far as I could tell my skull was still unbroken.

The popping noises continued. I could make out faint hints of shouting as well. Then three more loud explosions: crump, crump, crump! The air and my clothes rippled with each, but none came as near as the first shell that had shattered the windows and knocked me to my prone and sightless state.

I started to sit up, realized halfway that the rattling drumrolls I heard were gunfire, and quickly abandoned that plan. Instead I reached out and tried to make sense of my immediate surroundings by touch. There was broken glass all over the floor, and several overturned chairs and desks within reach.

When someone else’s hand closed on mine I nearly screamed. Then a woman’s voice, Reyes’s, shouted into my ear: “Are you OK?”

I shook my head, immediately regretted it, and grunted, “Can’t see!”

“Shit. Stay down, there’s more coming -“

She flopped on top of me. Three more crumps pierced the world. This time they were accompanied by visual flickers, and I dared to hope that my sight might return.

Suddenly I thought of Sophie, and said her name desperately.

“She’s all right. Okocha got her.” Reyes’s mouth was so close to my ear that I could feel her breath, but I still had to strain to make out her words. “They’re in the helicopter. It’s bulletproof.”

I felt a brief flare of gratitude towards tall, surly Okocha. My mind was slowly returning to me. It was a dubious blessing. Pain was blossoming in a half-dozen places where I had been cut by shrapnel glass, but that was nothing compared to the paralyzing shock and terror of realizing just how near I was to dying. There were men outside trying to kill me, men armed not just with guns but with artillery.

“You and me,” Reyes said, “we’re not all right,” and I moaned at this confirmation that my life was about to end in this concrete coffin of a building. “There’s a lot of them out there, and they’ve got three mortars at least.”

I felt sick and weak with fear, my muscles seemed almost beyond my control, and I was dizzy from my head injury, I could barely speak. “What do we do?” I pleaded.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t think they know anyone’s still in here, but if we stand up they’ll figure it out in a hurry. We’ll never make it to the chopper. We better wait for a chance.”

We lay there for some time, listening to the gunfire. There seemed to be two kinds; sporadic bursts like strings of firecrackers going off, and a louder and steadier kind that sounded more like an assembly line. I supposed the latter came from the door guns on the helicopter. The air was redolent with acrid gunpowder. Bullets repeatedly slammed into the school wall, or flew through the window and above us. Once one hit something metal not far away with a godawful clang! and I whimpered. I would have screamed if I could have drawn enough breath into my terror-constricted lungs.

All I wanted to do was curl up into a fetal ball, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for this horror to somehow end, one way or another. If I’d been alone I might have done just that. But Reyes’s presence, her lean body tensed against mine, helped calm me a little. I forced myself to relax my cramping muscles a little, to breathe deeply. Vague figures began to outline themselves in my vision, dark shapes emerging from total blackness. At least my sight was coming back. But that wouldn’t do me much good if I died here.

Three more crumps were followed by a new sound; that of an engine beginning to howl, slowly attaining a crescendo. The helicopter.

“They’re leaving without us,” Reyes said grimly.

I was speechless at this unforgivable betrayal.

“No choice. They’re walking the mortars towards the chopper. Can’t risk a direct hit. This is our chance. When they lift off, everyone out there will be shooting at them for all they’re worth. We can try to go out a window on the other side. I don’t think there’s anyone still there.”

It sounded insane and I told her so.

“You got any better ideas?” she demanded.

“We could just surrender.”

“To the narcos?” She actually laughed, harshly. “They’ll cut your dick off and make you eat it.”

That didn’t sound appealing. “But I can’t see!” I protested, although that was becoming less and less true.

“I’ll take you to the window. You just go through it. OK?”

The engine noise swelled until it devoured all others. Reyes grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and dragged me across the room at a near-run. I outweighed her by about fifty pounds, but it didn’t feel like I had any choice. My eyes had recovered enough to see the blurred outline of the window, waist-high and just big enough, maybe. When I dove through it my shoulders knocked out a few remaining bits of broken glass. I landed on wet mud. A second later Reyes vaulted to the ground beside me.

The rotor wash from the rising helicopter was like a giant hand shoving us down into the ground. Reyes pulled me to my feet again and tried to lead me away from the school at a dead run, but the ground was uneven and I kept stumbling and falling as the noise of the helicopter diminished away.

Dark shapes loomed ahead. I got my free hand up just in time to keep from running facefirst into a tree. Then we were in jungle, wading through a sea of vegetation that seemed to be attacking us. Vines clawed at my legs. Branches tore at my head.

In the distance, I heard shouts.

“Oh, no.” For the first time Reyes sounded scared. “Shit shit shit. I think they saw us.”

Chapter 7

We staggered and stumbled onwards, mostly downhill. In places the jungle was like a wall and we had to find ways around rather than through. My feet kept sticking in deep puddles of mud. After the first shouts we didn’t hear any noises except those we made ourselves, as branches snapped beneath our feet and leaves rustled in our wake, but we didn’t dare hope that we had escaped unnoticed.

The air was thick and hot, and I was soon slick with sweat and short of breath. At least my sight was returning; bright colours pulsated strangely, and little showers of glittering sparks cascaded across my field of vision, but I could see and make sense of the world again.

Ahead of me Reyes pulled up to a halt so sudden that I nearly crashed into her.

“What is it?” I whispered.

She pointed downwards. I looked down and saw a thin dirt trail wending its way through the jungle.

“Might be an animal track,” she said, “might be people.”

“Should we follow it?”

“How should I know?”

After a second I forced a rueful smile and said, “I was sort of hoping you had all the answers here.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve never actually been lost in the jungle pursued by bloodthirsty paramilitaries before, so you’ll have to forgive me if there’s a certain amount of making it up as I go along here.” She considered. Her face was already laced with scrapes and smeared with mud. I supposed I looked even worse. “No. Can’t take the chance. Sorry.”

She pushed on into the forbidding wall of jungle, raising her arms up to protect her head. I grunted, dismayed, and followed.

The ground grew steeper and rockier, and the hardwoods, vines and bushes were slowly replaced by palms and ferns. These were much easier to walk through, but they grew from ground covered with slippery boulders rendered almost invisible by slick moss. I slipped on one, fell into a mud puddle, lost a shoe and had to stop to recover it. Reyes hovered above me as I emptied it and put it back on, fumbling feverishly with the laces. I knew a minute’s delay could conceivably mean our deaths.

A few minutes later I began to hear an ominous rushing sound. Soon afterwards we stumbled out onto a rocky bluff above a roaring whitewater river lined with a scree of rocks and pebbles. It was twenty feet wide at its narrowest, dotted with rocks the size of washing machines wet from the constant spray. The mist rising downstream indicated the rapids became even more violent there.

“Shit.” Reyes looked like she wanted to kick something. “God damn it.”

I seconded the sentiment. In both directions the river bent back towards where we had begun. We had to either somehow cross it or double back.

“We can’t go back,” she decided. “Actually, this might be good. If we can get across, that might buy us some time.”

I stared at the howling river. “Big if.”

“True.” She considered. “You see that rock there?” She pointed to one just under the surface, about three feet from the shore. “And there, and there, and that one?”

I gave her a dubious look. I saw what she was proposing – try to jump from rock to rock – but they were all either underwater or soaking wet. “I don’t know.”

“If you’d rather we can go back and try to make nice to the narcos,” she said sarcastically. “Or just wait here and see what happens.”

A sudden thought occurred to me. I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket, hoping against hope – but Martinez had been right, there was no signal out here.

“Does that have GPS?” Reyes asked, and when I nodded, “Good. Turn it off, save the battery.”

As I did so she took off her dark jacket. For the first time I saw the small automatic pistol on her belt. She drew the gun, took my iPhone, and bundled the jacket tightly around them both.

“Not exactly a dry bag,” she muttered, “but it’ll have to do.”

I slipped and fell while descending to the riverbank, which did nothing for my confidence. My Saucony running shoes, which had never had much in the way of treads, were covered with wet mud. I stared into the raging waters. The river was easily powerful enough to kill us both. But, incredibly, this seemed the least bad option.

“Do you think we can drink this?” I asked. Our exertions had left me painfully thirsty.

She shrugged. “I think right now dirty water is the least of our problems.”

I got down on all fours and drank from the river like a dog, thinking of the Biblical passage where a general chose his troops from men who did this. Upstream of me Reyes did the same.

“Hey,” I said, trying to make a joke, “go downstream, I don’t want your germs.”

Reyes rewarded me with a thin smile, then stood. “Do you want to go first?”

I swallowed. “Not really.”

“OK. Follow my lead.”

She flung her jacket across the river, then took her position on the shore nearest the first rock in the implausible stepping-stone bridge she had pointed out, rose onto the balls of her feet, and took a moment to breathe deeply. I watched uneasily. Even if she could do this, that didn’t mean I could; I was a runner and gym-goer, but not near as athletic as her.

She leapt like a ballet dancer. The first rock was about half an inch underwater. She bobbled the landing but somehow righted herself and continued without hesitation. The next rock was flat and above water, and she made a perfect crouching three-point landing, two feet and one hand on its slick surface. The third jump was the hardest, to an underwater rock with a sharp peak, but she made it look easy, bounced right off it and onto the next rock, like a stone skipping across the water, soared onto the far shore, and skidded and sprawled ingloriously onto the pebbled scree that fringed the river.

Reyes scrambled to her feet, grinning ruefully, and shouted to me, “Come on!”

I approached the edge of the river as if about to go over Niagara Falls without a barrel. The water whipped past as fast as I could run. But it had to be done.

“Visualize it!” Reyes instructed. “Be confident! Don’t hesitate!”

I closed my eyes, tried to imagine success, couldn’t, took three deep breaths, opened my eyes, and made myself jump.

My foot skidded off the first rock and I fell into deep whitewater that spun me around like a rag doll in a washing machine before plunging me down a steep drop worthy of a roller coaster. I curled into a fetal position half a second before slamming side-first against a wall of rock, and barely had time to take a breath before being yanked underwater as if by a giant hand, then expelled to the surface again and dragged over a field of sharp rocks that tore at my back and arms like a cheese grater.

I choked on a mouthful of water, flailed with all my limbs, caught a brief glimpse of the shore. My primal survival instinct somehow propelled me scrambling to the edge of that shallow patch of fanged stone, just in time to dive out of the main current before it swept me over another five-foot drop, and into a relatively placid eddy that swirled in a steep-sided rocky inlet. There I grabbed a dangling tree root before I could be sucked back into the mainstream. The water was still so powerful that it was all I could do to hold on. I looked around frantically.

“Grab this!” Reyes shouted above me, and the sleeve of her jacket slapped me in the face. She stood on dry ground directly above me. I grabbed the jacket. With her aid, and a final desperate effort, I managed to reverse-rappel out of the river and onto the dry ground beside her. There I flopped down and heaved for air like a dying fish.

She crouched beside me. “You OK?”

I managed to nod. I thought it might even be true. The river had left me with cuts and bruises aplenty, but no broken bones.

“Well,” she said, and shook her head in amazement, possibly at my survival. “Not exactly elegant, but any landing you walk away from is a good one, right?’

“Right,” I gasped. “Next time I’ll go for style points. It’s like figure skating. Artistic impression is very important.”

She chuckled. I managed a triumphant smile myself.

Then she glanced to the other side of the river, and her laugh suddenly faltered, and she dropped to a tense crouch beside me.

“What is it?” I whispered, but I already knew.

Chapter 8

The men hunting us were clearly visible from our vantage point behind the treeline. The two leaders were tall, young and handsome, in jeans and T-shirts; the other four were small and agelessly weathered, strong as tree trunks, in old and grimy clothes but with good boots. All carried well-worn rifles with banana-shaped magazines protruding from their base. AK-47 Kalashnikovs, the weapon of choice for cinematic bad guys everywhere, and apparently real ones too.

I didn’t understand how everything could have gone so wrong so fast. It was hard to believe that I was actually stranded in the Colombian jungle, that this was no movie, no corporate bonding exercise; that those men, if they found me, would torture and murder me.

They followed our muddy tracks to the riverbank. The young one wearing a red Che Guevera shirt, the opposite of camouflage, spoke into a handheld radio. We couldn’t hear anything over the river’s roar.

“They won’t try to cross,” I said to Reyes, trying to convince myself, whispering even though the river noise would have swallowed anything less than a shout. “It’s like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No one would try to cross that who didn’t have to.”

“They don’t need to,” she muttered back. “I can lip-read Spanish some. He’s calling friends on this side and telling them to come get us.”

I froze silent with new terror. I had dared to hope we might be relatively safe.

“Come on,” she said, “we better move.” She led the way deeper into the jungle.

I followed, but slipped, and had to grab a tree trunk to steady myself. The rustling leaves must have caught their attention. The hollow crackle of gunfire erupted behind me. I actually felt the slipstream as a bullet whizzed past my head. When I realized what it had been I sprinted forward, inspired by sheer mind-melting panic. Somehow I managed to mostly go around instead of through the trees and thorn bushes. I nearly ran Reyes over before I realized that she had slowed, and the shooting had stopped.

“Hold up,” she commanded. “We need to stop and think.”

I was too busy gasping for breath to argue. We sat on a fallen log so thick with moss and soft with decay that it barely supported our weight. A winged horde of mosquitoes and gnats swarmed us immediately.

“OK,” she said, after a break that seemed to hardly have begun. “This way.”

She led us diagonally back towards the river.

“Hey,” I said, when I realized she intended to follow it downstream. She didn’t respond. “Hey. Reyes.”

She stopped, turned, forced a smile to her mud-smeared face. “Lisa. If we’re going to live or die together we might as well operate on a first-name basis.”

“OK. Lisa. What are we doing?”

“Going downstream. I’m sure it’s what they expect, but we don’t have much choice. Upstream is narco territory, and the river’s the only referent we’ve got. If we try to cross the jungle we’ll get lost.” She pointed to the dark clouds already curdling in a corner of the sky. “Rainy season. Thirty minutes from now we won’t know where the sun is, we’ll start going in circles.”

“My phone,” I said. “GPS. We don’t need the sun to navigate.”

She considered. “True. Long as your battery lasts. But where do you want to go? Downstream we’ll eventually find civilization. And it’s where Harrison will look. I promise you he’s on the radio planning a rescue mission already. We just have to hope he finds us before the narcos do.”

“OK, downstream, sure. But this river goes like,” I mimed its wide snaking bends with a finger in the air. “We can follow it a lot faster by going in a straight line between the bends. The narcos,” the word felt strange in my mouth, “might not expect that.”

“Neither will Harrison.”

“They’ll find us as long as they’re looking for my phone signal. And they will be. Sophie will make them.” I felt newly optimistic. Our mutual survival suddenly seemed a whole lot more likely than it had even five minutes ago.

“A straight line in which direction?” Reyes – Lisa – asked. “We’d have to know exactly where the river goes.”

“We do. I have a picture. On my phone.”

It was a photo I had taken from the helicopter. The tin roof of the school was just barely visible, a glittering dot in the corner. The picture was dominated by the river snaking across the verdant carpet of the jungle.

“James Kowalski,” she said, “you’re a genius.”

I smiled with hope and relief. “And I thought I was just being a tourist.”

Chapter 9

We made our way north by northwest, calculating the direction from the sunlight in the picture. I hoped the half-charge on my iPhone would last. I hoped we would be hard to follow. I told myself I wasn’t about to die here in this trackless jungle, a rescue helicopter would be along momentarily, this desperate struggle for survival would soon be reduced to a colourful anecdote.

It was hard work fighting our way through the thick and uneven bush, worse than going uphill over cleared ground. My lungs and limbs soon burned with the effort, while the cuts and scrapes from the broken glass and the river rocks sang a painful symphony across my body, and a vicious headache pounded behind my eyes; but I reminded myself that things could be a lot worse.

I grew thirsty and for half an hour wished desperately for water. Then the clouds opened up, and I wished desperately for the water to go away. The downpour turned the already damp jungle floor into a vast smear of mud and leaves, and we slipped and fell frequently, covering ourselves in muck. Lisa kept my phone and her gun wrapped in her jacket against the rain. I hoped it would be enough.

“Let’s take a break,” she said, when we stumbled across a palm tree with fronds so dense that it acted as a natural umbrella, and I eagerly agreed.

I rested with my back against its rough trunk; Lisa stayed in the rain for a moment to let it wash her face clean before joining me. When she stepped back into relative dryness she gave me an amused look. “You should clean up too. You look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

I shrugged, exhausted. Now that we had stopped my legs were worryingly heavy, and I could feel hotspots that would soon become blisters inside my mud-soaked shoes. “I’d just get dirty again.”

“Well, maybe if they find us you can scare them away.”

We sat in weary silence for a moment.

Then I said, “Remember when you said, ‘don’t worry, you’ll be perfectly safe’?”

She winced. “In retrospect, that might have been a slight exaggeration.”

“You don’t fucking say.”

“You know we were set up.”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

“They had mortars in place. They could easily have taken the school before we got there. They were waiting for us.”

“How could they know we were coming?”

“Anyone might have told them. Whole country’s corrupt. You know there’s a civil war here, against the Marxist guerrillas in the jungle, the FARC.”

“Sure,” I said vaguely.

“Well, the army used to be so useless that all these right-wing paramilitary groups started up, private armies basically, to fight the FARC. But it turned out the cure was even worse than the disease. Massacres, torture, death squads, mass rapes, drug smuggling, name it. The paras got in bed with the narcos, just like the FARC had, and the government got in bed with the paras, because at least they weren’t godless Commies, right? Half the Colombian Congress is under investigation right now for paramilitary links, which is basically a euphemism for taking their drug money. The narcos have this wonderful strategy called plomo o plata, lead or silver, a bullet or a bribe. They come to you and give you the choice of either taking a briefcase full of money or being killed on the spot. It’s very effective. There’s probably a whole chapter on it in the unexpurgated version of ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ Point is, anyone here might be on their payroll, and frequently is. The question isn’t how they knew, it’s why they bothered. Me, Harrison, Okocha, we’re small fry, not worth setting up an ambush and dragging mortars halfway across the jungle for.”

I said, “Sophie.”

“She’s safe. I saw her get on the helicopter.”

“She’s not small fry. She’s a big deal.”

Lisa shook her head. “I doubt they even knew she was there. We told the Colombians we were bringing technical experts, but we didn’t give them names.”

I wondered if I should tell her about the mysterious link between Sophie and Kostopoulos, but decided against it. Not until I had asked Sophie about it myself. Assuming I ever saw her again.

“Listen,” Lisa said. “James, I’m sorry. I don’t even know how to apologize. I would never have brought you here if I had even dreamed this might be possible. I’m going to get you out of this. I promise.”

“I always wanted an extraordinary life. Should have been more careful what I wished for.” I tried to laugh. “They’ll come find us as soon as the rain clears, right? I mean the good guys. They’ll rescue us and it’ll be an amazing story to tell my friends.”

“Right.”

But she didn’t seem anywhere near as confident as I would have liked.

Chapter 10

“You’re Canadian, right?” Lisa asked, at our next rest stop.

“Yeah. What gave it away?”

“I noticed you bleed maple syrup. Also, your accent. How’d you wind up in California?”

“Sophie, mostly.”

“How’d you two get together?”

“A friend. Jesse.” A friend who might be indirectly responsible for our wretched state, I didn’t say. “At this crazy hacker party. First time we met we were on the roof of a warehouse in Brooklyn wearing biohazard suits and drinking absinthe.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Yeah. It wasn’t, actually. Not really my scene, and her dad had just died. She got pretty drunk, and kind of weepy, and Jesse sort of dumped her on me, and… ” I trailed off, remembering. “Somehow we wound up sitting up all night in this diner, drinking coffee and talking. You know how when you were younger, sometimes you’d meet a stranger, and there’d be something about them, and you’d just pour your heart out in a really deep conversation? I didn’t even think that could happen to me any more. I mean, I was thirty. But it did. Anyways, she lived in L.A. and me in Toronto, and I think once we sobered up we were both sort of embarrassed, but when I went to California a couple months later to see Jesse, we met up again, and it happened again. We’ve been together ever since.”

“Nice story.”

I shrugged, remembering how yesterday Sophie’s deceit, and the very real prospect of breaking up with her, and the thought of all the grief and dislocation that would follow, had seemed an almost unbearable weight. Compared to what I faced now those seemed like wonderful problems to have.

“How did you get into the DEA?” I asked, to keep the conversation alive. It was nice to have something to think about other than the paralyzing fear of discovery, abduction, captivity, torture and death.

Lisa considered. “Kind of fell into it, I guess. I used to be in the Army. Hated it. Someone was always ordering me around. They never told me that was going to happen. But I did like getting paid to shoot people, so after my discharge I looked for another job like that. The police and FBI wouldn’t take me because they said I had some kind of psychotic antisocial homicidal tendencies or something. But it turns out in the DEA that’s actually a big advantage.”

Despite the circumstances I laughed. Her deadpan was perfect.

She looked away for a moment. “My mother used to have a drug problem. So I take it all kind of personally. So I joined up.”

“She’s better now?”

“She overdosed when I was in Iraq.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s get going,” she said curtly, rising to her feet. “The narcos won’t stop for the rain, and they live here, once they find our trail they can probably follow us anywhere.”

I stared at her, pierced by renewed terror. I had been telling myself we were almost safe. “Seriously?”

“It’s possible. I vote we go get rescued instead of staying and finding out.”

We slogged onwards through the soaking rain. Her jacket got wet enough that I began to fear that the water might damage my phone, and I began to feel chilly when we stopped for breaks. Then it stopped, suddenly, as if God had simply turned off the tap, and the clouds began to disintegrate into blue sky. When we stopped in a small rocky clearing patch I took my shirt off to let the afternoon sun warm me.

“Keep it on,” Lisa said sharply. “The only way to dry your clothes out here is to wear them. You won’t want a wet shirt if we wind up spending the night.”

I gave her an alarmed look. “I thought we were supposed to get rescued today.”

“We’re supposed to do everything we can to maximize our chances. The rest is out of our hands.”

“That’s comforting,” I muttered, and put the shirt back on.

When we stopped the insects were almost unbearable, and when we started again the blisters on my feet were so painful they brought tears to my eyes, until they went numb and were replaced by the agonizing protests in my cramping legs. I forced myself to trudge onward behind Lisa, who marched like an unstoppable machine. I told myself she had an unfair advantage because she was smaller, the square-cube law made it easier for her to support her body weight. Though there was also the small fact that she had the physique and stamina of a professional athlete, while I was a casual runner.

In my haze of exhaustion I didn’t even hear the noise until she stopped, cocked her head, and said, “What’s that?”

For a second I couldn’t hear anything but my own pounding heartbeat. Then a strange high-pitched buzz prickled at my ears.

At first I feared another mortar attack, and my lungs seemed to squeeze shut with terror; but then I realized, no, this sound was a different. And yet oddly familiar. A rescue helicopter? No. But I was almost sure it was some kind of engine -

I started as if shot. “Oh, fuck. Give me my phone!” To Lisa’s credit she followed my command and didn’t waste time asking why. “It’s a drone. Tracking my phone.” I held the iPhone’s off button down until it went dark. “Run.”

Chapter 11

I didn’t need to tell her twice. She took off along the path of least resistance, and I followed, all my aches and pains forgotten in the face of imminent death, sprinting until I caught my foot on a root and sprawled facefirst into mud.

The growling engine dopplered closer. I rolled over to my back and caught a glimpse of it between two towering canopy trees as it soared overhead. It looked just like the one we had examined in the school. Its motor sounded stronger than our lab’s UAVs, and it looked sleeker in flight, more aerodynamic. In flight it reminded me of a dull gray dragonfly grown to monstrous horror-movie size.

Its buzz diminished into the distance. I exhaled with relief, then wondered if its belly camera had captured our presence. But from the helicopter the jungle had looked like an opaque wall of green, and even if it could have seen us, its neural net was trained to go after phone signals, not human figures, or it would have blown up the first Colombian peasant it saw.

“You OK?” Lisa asked, crouching behind me.

A horrible thought occurred to me. “Do you have a phone?” That drone couldn’t have been looking for my phone in particular; they must have sent it after any signal it could find, and told their men to turn off their own Nokias and Motorolas.

“I turned it off after your girlfriend scared me half to death in that meeting.”

“Thank God. Jesus fucking Christ. Like things weren’t bad enough. Drug thugs with fucking killer drones.” I shook my head. The gunmen we had seen had seemed so low-tech; even their radio had looked like something out of an old movie. “Why do they have UAVs up here in these mountains in the first place?”

“Ask them when they find us. Better yet, don’t.”

I sat up straight. “Oh shit.” I felt like I had just swallowed a bowl of icewater. “There’s a cell phone on that thing, I’m sure there’s GPS too. If they can communicate with it, they know where we are now, within maybe a kilometre, a lot less if it triangulated. Oh fuck.”

Lisa took absorbed that, then said grimly, “So get up. Only thing we can do is get away from here as fast as we can.”

We hustled onwards in terrified silence. Eventually we reached the river again. It had grown even wider and wilder, roared through a steep-sided canyon carved by its sheer whitewater churning past rocks the size of SUVs; there was no chance of crossing back to the other side. To the west the sun had vanished behind the hills, and the clouds were beginning to redden.

I wondered too late if we should have tried to lose ourselves in the jungle. Our pursuers knew roughly where we were, and probably guessed we would head for the river. But we didn’t have any choice, if we wanted to be rescued. The only way our rescuers might find us in the jungle was if we turned on our phones, which would get us killed. Our only hope was to be seen from the air. It seemed like a thin one.

My bleak mood brightened considerably when we saw the helicopter.

The river was so loud that we saw the vehicle before we heard it, flying just above the canopy trees about half a mile downriver, heading our way. It was different from the one that had carried us, smaller and lighter, more civilian than military. Lisa hesitated, and I could tell we were thinking the same thing: government or narcos? But it had a Colombian flag painted on its side.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“I think it’s the good guys. The narcos wouldn’t dare bring their own helicopters up here right now, with the air force looking for us.”

I sighed with relief so intense that I staggered. She began to wave her arms, and I did the same. The helicopter’s course didn’t change, but it was moving towards us, flying slowly, obviously looking out for us; they would see us soon enough.

Then I saw a dark blotch in the sky, above and behind the helicopter, moving fast.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Lisa followed my gaze and froze.

The drone stooped downwards like a bird of prey, heading straight for the helicopter and the signals emanating from within. One or more of its passengers had left their phones on, phones that were sending out here-I-am! radio bursts, hoping for a response from a friendly cellular tower.

“Look out,” I muttered, hoping they would somehow notice, if they sped up they could easily outrun it, “come on, look out, look out, look out… “

The UAV flew straight into the helicopter’s whirling blades, and transformed in an eyeblink into a bright flower of flame. It was like watching a magic trick.

A moment later the dull boom hit us, but I hardly noticed, I was too busy staring aghast at the helicopter, groaning as if I too had been struck. The explosion had caused the Jesus-nut that held its rotor to seize. That in turn had instantaneously transferred the angular momentum of the blades to the rest of the vehicle, causing the whole aircraft to spin wildly in the air for a moment like some kind of demented carnival ride. Then it fell sideways, tumbling head-over-tail like a thrown stone, and disappeared into the jungle on the other side of the river. The roaring water swallowed up whatever sound it might have made.

I stared at where it had vanished for what felt like a long time, as if it might yet rise up unscathed to save us. There were no flames or smoke, it had neither burned or exploded, but I couldn’t imagine anyone surviving that crash. Not that it made any difference to us. That other bank was about as accessible to us as Antarctica.

Eventually I demanded, in a voice that sounded worryingly like that of a lost and frightened child, “What do we do now?”

After a long moment Lisa answered in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it over the roaring whitewater, yet so determined it brooked no dissent: “We keep going. We don’t give up. We’ve still got a chance.”

But I could tell that she was just trying to keep up my spirits. We weren’t going to be rescued. The narcos would get us first.

Chapter 12

That was easily the worst night of my life, even worse than the redeye flight the night my father died. The clothes on our back were still damp, Lisa’s jacket was soaked, and we were a kilometre above sea level, the jungle was freezing. A thick cloud of mosquitoes swarmed us, eating us alive. We huddled together beneath a miserable blanket of ferns and leaves, close enough to the river to find it by sound in the morning, distant enough that we would be able to hear oncoming intruders. My head throbbed, my muscles burned, my various contusions ached, and all these agonies and the cold seemed to add to each other’s potency. But worst of all was the fear.

“Breathe deeply,” she murmured to me, as I shivered. We were so close that I could feel her breath against my cheek. “Tibetan monks can keep themselves warm in subzero conditions with breath alone.”

I tried to follow her example. Her whole body rose and fell with every respiration. She was all taut muscle, holding her felt like holding a wild animal. Our bodies lay pressed together tightly, like lovers, but there was nothing even remotely sexual about it, we were just two desperate creatures trying to survive.

“Do you think they’ll come after us tomorrow?” I asked.

“You mean the narcos or the air force?”

“Either. Both.”

She paused to think. “They’ll send someone after the missing helicopter, the air force, but they might think we got picked up before the crash. If they can even find it. Wouldn’t be the first time a chopper went missing in the jungle. God damn it.”

“Yeah. We were so close.”

“Not what I mean. Harrison would have been on board.”

I flinched, horrified. It hadn’t occurred to me that people we knew might have died in that crash. “Oh my God. Sophie. She might have come along to track our phone signals -“

“No way in hell Harrison would have allowed a civilian on a rescue mission. Don’t worry. That I can absolutely guarantee.”

I relaxed as much as I could. “Did you know him well?”

“Not really. But he was a good soldier.”

That reminded me of her military tenure. “How long were you in the Army?” I really just wanted to keep talking, about anything. It was better than silent misery.

“Four years.”

“Why did you join?”

She snorted. “You ever been to Hondo, Texas?”

“No.”

“It’s famous for one thing, the sign outside town that says ‘This is God’s Country, Please Don’t Drive Through It Like Hell.’ They need it, because people take one look and stand on the gas pedal. If you’d grown up there you’d have done anything to get out too.”

“You don’t sound Texan.”

“I have done everything humanly possible to expunge the stain of Hondo, Texas from myself.”

“Oh.”

“And my mom was Mexican via Minnesota. Anyways the Army seemed like the only way out. Everything else looked like a dead end. And I guess maybe I wanted some structure in my life. Never exactly got much from my mom.”

“What about your dad?”

“Dad who?”

“Oh.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea. She always loved me. She was just seventeen different kinds of fucked up.”

I didn’t say anything.

“But the army was good to me. Straightened me out. Mostly.” I felt her smile. “Paid for my degree, too. And sometimes they let me shoot rocket launchers. You ever fire a rocket launcher?”

“No.”

“You’re missing out.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“What about you?” she asked. “From Toronto originally?”

“Not quite. Small town in Southern Ontario. About a couple hours away.”

“What’s that like?”

I grimaced. “I used to call it the Land of Bland.”

“Right now that doesn’t sound so bad.”

“True,” I admitted.

But at the time it had felt like a prison. I had been a sickly and lonely kid, had spent most of my youth in small-town strip-mall Ontario reading books, watching movies, and playing video and role-playing games, with Jesse my only true friend, both of us frustrated by the interminable dullness of our lives. We knew that somewhere out there was a world of discovery and adventure, where people who mattered did things that mattered. When he and I were teenagers our frustration had sometimes erupted into acts of futile and minor destruction: smashing windows, stealing signs, setting fires.

University had been better, but I had learned there, to my consternation, that being the second smartest person in my high school meant nothing in the real world. Waterloo was Canada’s finest technical school, “the MIT of the North,” and amid that galaxy of talent my star was merely average. After graduation I had drifted from one lucrative but joyless engineering job to another, met and moved in with a perfectly nice and perfectly ordinary girl named Sonia – and been miserable and frustrated beyond description, thanks to the ceaseless gnawing of my thwarted ambitions.

Back then, every time I heard about anything extraordinary, anything done by someone amazing, it made my gut tighten into a knot of angry frustration, made me want to spit. Scientists bursting the frontiers of human knowledge, engineers unveiling world-changing creations, journalists reporting on discoveries and desperate conflicts, artists reshaping their culture, tycoons staking billion-dollar bets on the future: that kind of news just rubbed my nose in the fact that I would never in my life experience anything remotely similar; that all the incredible richness and endless wild possibilities of the world outside my own little bubble of dull comfort would go forever undiscovered.

Or so I had thought, until I met Sophie.

Without her I was ordinary; and what I had always wanted, more than anything, was an extraordinary life.

It was her mischievous grin that had first caught my attention at the party where we met, even before Jesse had introduced us, even before I began to realize just how extraordinary she was. During the one year Sophie had spent in standard undergraduate classes, before she was fast-tracked straight to a doctorate, a strange and sometimes unseemly competition to invent math puzzles that she might find challenging had developed among Caltech’s faculty. When she wore that impish grin she looked a lot like a spoiled teenager, but in truth she was an intellectual titan.

The great and the good flocked like moths to her searchlight mind. Because of her I had dined with senators and Nobel laureates, met with billionaires planning the future of space exploration, attended the legendary Davos and TED conferences, been flown first-class to the world’s greatest research complexes, experienced a world that people like me could usually only taste in dreams and stories.

But it still hadn’t been easy spending the last three years of my life in orbit around hers. The ratio of people who knew me as Dr. Warren’s boyfriend to those who knew my name was probably five to one. It was like being a 1950s wife, or an ordinary guy dating a movie star. Not that there was supposed to be anything wrong with that, in this era of sexual equality – but there was. Playing eternal second fiddle to my genius girlfriend rankled, a lot. By normal-person standards, I was well above average: smart, athletic, interesting, successful. But from Sophie’s rarefied intellectual eyrie there wasn’t much space between me and mediocrity. The work I did for her lab, building, testing, and repairing, was interesting and nontrivial; but others treated me not as her partner, but more like a subservient assistant who Dr. Warren happened to sleep with.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lisa said.

I shrugged awkwardly. “Sophie.”

“I’m going to get you back to her. I promise.”

I forced a smile. “Thanks.”

A drop fell on my face. Then another, and another.

“Oh, no,” I said, rolling to look up at the sky. There were no stars visible. “Oh, no, you’re shitting me, you have to be kidding. Come on. This isn’t fair.”

The rain ignored my pleas. It was more gentle than the afternoon downpour, but it was steady and insistent, and it wouldn’t stop.

I thought of all the adventure stories I had read growing up, of Frodo and Sam crossing the endless wastes, Allen Quatermain in Africa, Juan Rico at Camp Arthur Currie, Biggles landing on some godforsaken runway, Huck Finn rafting down the Mississippi, Jim Hawkins in the Caribbean. Too late I was realizing that no one in their right minds would ever want to have a real adventure. There had never been much in those books about endless hours of gnawing misery, gasping exhaustion, and bone-shuddering terror.

I looked at Lisa and saw that her eyes were distant and she was smiling. A real smile, not a grimace; a little forced, maybe, but a little dreamy too.

“What are you smiling at?” I asked.

She said, “I’m trying to enjoy the moment.”

I stared at her incredulously. “What?”

“Happiness comes from within. The Stoics believed it was possible to be happy even as you were stretched upon the rack.”

“Right. I’m sorry, but that’s fucking insane. I have never been more miserable in my entire life than right now.”

“You can’t think of it like that. You can’t compare it to the good times. Times like this you have to remember, every instant is precious, life is short, we could die any minute. Every moment of your life without exception is a gift to be treasured, even this one. Especially this one.”

“You don’t seriously believe that.”

“You don’t seriously not.”

I didn’t answer.

“Close your eyes and breathe deep,” she said. “Just concentrate on that. On how good it is just to breathe, even if it hurts. It helps. I promise.”

“Like meditation?”

“Sort of. But more like a celebration.”

I tried, and in fact, there was something to it. Maybe knowing how close I was to death made every breath, every morsel of life, taste particularly delicious. My aches and pains and the cold rain were awful, but at the same time, somehow, for a few minutes at least, I convinced myself that it was glorious to still be alive.

But only for a few minutes. I was insufficiently stoic to enjoy freezing to death. As we grew soaked my teeth began to chatter, and Lisa began to shiver against me too.

“We have to start moving or we’ll get hypothermia,” she said.

“What happened to enjoying every moment?” I asked nastily. “Isn’t hypothermia a precious gift too?”

“Don’t be an asshole. Get up.”

I felt too weak to stand, much less move, but I made myself totter to my feet and follow her through the darkness. Travelling through the jungle was even worse in the darkness than by day. I let Lisa take my hand and lead me like a child.

The rest of that night was a horrific miasma of total exhaustion. Twice I sat down and told her I could go no further. The first time she cajoled me back to my feet. The second time she had to order me. I didn’t have the strength to disobey.

I had no idea where we were going. In the morning I learned that she hadn’t either; she had simply advanced blindly into the jungle, counting on the natural human tendency to go in circles when lost. It worked. When dawn finally broke through the torn curtains of the rainclouds, lifting my spirits and restoring some semblance of strength, we walked straight towards the sun and reached the river in less than half an hour. From there, after a brief discussion of the wisdom or foolishness of remaining near the crash, we continued downstream.

Around noon we were discovered.

Chapter 13

A muddy trail emerged from the jungle and ran along the river. It was only a foot wide, but against that backdrop of rampant botanical chaos it was as obvious as a six-lane highway. I didn’t want to stop, I felt like only momentum was keeping me from collapse, but Lisa halted and motioned me to do the same.

We stared silently at the trail. The dilemma was obvious. On it we would make far better time, and greatly increase our chances of discovery.

A few seconds later I heard a clopping noise, turned to face it without thinking, and saw a teenage boy with a dark aboriginal face, riding a saddled donkey. He looked like a miniature cowboy, right down to the lasso hanging on his donkey’s side, except for his Yankees baseball cap.

The shock of encountering another human being felt like being struck by lightning. We exchanged flabbergasted looks for a full five seconds. Then, without anyone saying a word, he pulled on the reins, turned the donkey around, jabbed his heels into its flanks and raced away.

“Fuck,” Lisa breathed.

“You think he was with them?”

She shook her head. “Just a local. But he might tell them. He’ll tell somebody.”

“Maybe the police.”

“That’s not a comforting thought, in Colombia. I’ll bet you whoever set us up already paid the local police to turn us over to the narcos. Who have also probably already made it known to the locals that if they see us and don’t report us, they’ll be in a world of shit.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I felt like I had been punched. “Every time I think this can’t get any worse… “

“Don’t kid yourself. Things aren’t even so bad yet. We’re still both in one piece. Imagine how much fun this would have been with shrapnel in your gut.”

“I don’t know how much further I can walk.”

“You’re going to be fine.” She considered. “I guess we might as well take the trail. Not much point in hiding now.”

It was a relative relief walking over mostly level ground devoid of vegetative pitfalls, but I still felt like I was near the end of my strength, limping on both legs. Their weakness that worried me more than the pain. I felt like my legs might suddenly buckle and fail to continue no matter how strong my will. And I was starving, we hadn’t eaten since a snack box before the helicopter.

Ahead of me Lisa froze in mid-step, as if suddenly turned to stone, and I nearly collided with her. I didn’t understand until I saw motion on the ground less than two feet from her; a snake, long and brightly coloured. I held my breath until it finished slithering behind a curtain of ferns. We gave it a wide berth.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, both scared and irrationally exasperated. “You guys should have just napalmed and Agent Oranged this whole fucking country.”

“Don’t think we haven’t tried. They’ve been dumping herbicide here for ten years. You can see how well it’s worked.”

The trail veered away from the river. We took a last drink and followed. It was like a narrow canyon through steep green walls. My ears rang with the collective buzz of the ambient mosquitos, whose feasting I had long since given up trying to prevent.

“Hey,” Lisa said, a note of hope in her voice.

“What?”

She gestured at a strange tree. It looked a little like a giant stalk of asparagus, with peeling brown skin, a starburst of huge green leaves erupting from its top, a weird purple protrusion like a phallus – and a tight clump of very familiar objects indeed, clustered together in a dangling bundle the size of a shopping bag: bananas.

They were somewhere between green and yellow, but we weren’t feeling fussy. I grabbed the rubbery trunk and pulled it downward so Lisa could cut them free with the knife I hadn’t even known she had. A day earlier I would have described them as tasteless, with the consistency of wet cardboard, but under the circumstances they were indescribably delicious.

When we turned the corner we found that it had only been the outlier of a whole stand of banana trees. Minutes later Lisa spotted a pair of avocado trees. I had thought my belly full of bananas, but changed my mind when she cut open a perfectly ripe avocado.

We marched on with new strength and purpose. But Lisa was also moving more slowly, more watchfully.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That wasn’t a random patch of fruit trees.” Her voice was low. “That was a plantation. People live near here. Stay quiet.”

I obeyed. But when she turned a bend and held up a hand to stop me I couldn’t resist edging forward until I saw what she saw: a collection of a dozen mud-and-thatch buildings in extreme disrepair, surrounded by neck-high grass. In places the roofs and walls had fallen in.

“Nobody home,” I murmured.

“Doesn’t look like it.” But she moved forward very cautiously.

The huts had been abandoned for months, if not longer. A thin layer of muddy dust covered the aluminum pots, neatly folded Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt, and Titanic poster in the first hut we examined. A few rats scurried in the shadows. Some rotted pineapples lay stacked beneath a crude wooden table. The utter desertion was eerie; I felt like the discoverers of the Marie Celeste.

“I guess they moved out.” I said.

“I guess.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

In an earthenware pot Lisa found what looked like mud, and scooped a handful of it into her pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Better living through chemistry.”

On the way out of the village she paused to strip elliptical leaves about the size of Oreo cookies from a cluster of bushes near the path, then handed a damp handful to me, along with a marble-sized clump of the mud she had claimed.

“What is it?”

“The clay acts as a catalyst. You need it to activate the coca leaves.”

“Coca?” I stared at the wadded leaves. “As in cocaine?”

“Yes. You won’t get high, it just increases energy and dulls pain. Millions of campesinos chew it every day. Stick the clay in your cheek and chew the leaves.”

I obeyed. That side of my tongue quickly went numb, and indeed I soon began to feel a little stronger and less miserable.

The trail passed a muddy hill the size of a school bus, covered with thin patches of grass and a dense storm of clawed animal tracks. Pale knobby stones were visible amid the crumbling mud. Lisa continued on, her mind on the road ahead. I glanced at the hill, wondering why its grass was so emaciated when the rest of the jungle was teeming with life.

Then I came to a sudden stop and said, hoarsely, “Lisa.”

“What?”

“Those aren’t stones.”

We advanced slowly, crouched, and examined the gnawed bones protruding from the earth as if they were some fragile and valuable archaeological discovery. Then without speaking we began to circumnavigate the grassy mound. On the the other side one of the misshapen holes dug by animals revealed a human skull and most of a hand. The hand had belonged to an adult. The skull was so small it had to be a child’s, maybe an infant’s.

“Oh my God.” I backed away as if some horrific demon-thing lurked within the mound. It was big enough for dozens of corpses. A hundred. Maybe more. “Why? Who?” “The paramilitaries.” Lisa’s voice, unlike mine, was flat. “The FARC, the Marxist guerrillas, they’re still active around here. The indigenous tribes and campesinos tend to support them. So the paramilitaries have this strategy called ‘draining the water where the fishes swim.’ They massacre a village or two to convince everyone else in the area to abandon their homes and run like hell. Leaving no local support for the FARC, and new land for the paras to use.”

“Which they use to start growing cocaine,” I guessed.

She laughed harshly. “No need to start. It’s already there. The FARC make plenty of money from it too. Don’t get the wrong idea, they’re as bad as the paras.”

“So, wait.” I was confused. “The guys after us, are they narcos, or paras, or FARC, or what? What’s the difference?”

“Does it matter?”

I supposed it didn’t. I couldn’t stop staring at the baby’s skull, even though it made me feel even weaker and queasier than I already was. I wondered if it had been a boy or girl, and how many other children had been in there, and how they had died. Had they seen their parents murdered? Had they been buried alive?

“It’s complicated,” Lisa said. “Everyone’s a narco. The FARC, the paras, and the cartels, they don’t really give a shit about politics any more. Cocaine is their lifeblood, and they’re all in bed with each other. In some areas you get the FARC and the paras, theoretically sworn enemies, making mafia turf agreements to keep the cocaine flowing for everyone. Money trumps politics.” She motioned at the hill. “But the guys who did this are paras. The FARC might set off car bombs but they don’t slaughter campesinos wholesale. The guys after us are probably the same ones that did this, but who knows?”

“No wonder that cowboy ran away.”

“Yeah. In a sick way this is good news. If I was him I wouldn’t exactly run to tell anyone, not if I knew about this, I’d pretend I never saw nothing.” She considered. “If we keep following these trails we’re bound to run into a road eventually. The question is whether we run into them -” She stopped, tilted her head as if listening. “Aw, shit.”

After a second I heard it too. A faraway whining buzz, like a colossal mosquito in the distance. Another drone.

Chapter 14

“Your phone’s off, right?” Lisa demanded.

I nodded. “But there are cameras on those things. We better get under cover.”

She retreated from the grave and into the thick jungle around it.

“I don’t know,” I reconsidered as I followed. “If we stay off the trails that’ll slow us down, right?”

“And if we stay on them they’ll see us.”

“I don’t know.” I tried to weigh the possibilities. “I doubt they’re watching the video streams in real time. I mean, in theory they could, there’s an antenna on the drone, but it would be low bandwidth, and they’d need a big-ass ground transceiver. Probably all they can do is look at the video when the drone lands.”

“How do they land? There weren’t any wheels on the one in the school.”

“You catch them in a net.” I returned to my topic. “Once you got the videos back there’d be hours of footage to study, it would take a person forever. But you can train Sophie’s neural nets to look for human figures in video, and that would be a lot faster, maybe a couple minutes. Maybe they can do that, maybe they can’t.”

“In short,” Lisa summarized, “your detailed technical analysis has led you to the conclusion that you have no clue.”

I shook my head, frustrated. “It all depends on their resources, and – no. No idea. Why do they have UAVs out here in the middle of the fucking jungle to begin with? Just sitting aroud waiting to hunt us down? This is crazy. Those things have carbon fibre airframes. They must cost half a million dollars each. Where did they get them?”

“That’s small change to the cartels,” Lisa said. “When I started working Colombia I realized they’re so big you can’t think of them as criminal gangs. You have to think of them as a whole parallel shadow state within the state. How much can one of those things carry? What’s the payload?”

“Depends how much range you want to sacrifice.” I considered. “My guess is with a fully charged fuel cell one could carry ten kilos of high explosive maybe five hundred kilometres. Three hundred miles.”

“Or ten kilos of pure cocaine. Street value eight hundred thousand dollars.”

I looked at her. That hadn’t occurred to me.

“I bet they’re mostly used for smuggling,” she said. “Fly them at night over empty terrain. You don’t have to worry about couriers or roadblocks. That’s why they’ve got them here. There are cocaine factories in these hills, turning the leaves into coca paste. I bet the drones take it from here to Darien or the Pacific coast for export. It’s brilliant. And they can use them to kill anyone with a cell phone. The perfect weapon, and the perfect mule.” Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know how we’re going to stop them.”

“Not just a cell phone,” I said. “You could easily train a neural net to target a license plate. Maybe even a face. Or even easier, a particular set of GPS coordinates, if there’s some building or home you’re after.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful.”

In the distance, the sound of the drone began to fade away.

“Hey.” An idea had just flickered alight in my head. “Give me your phone.”

Lisa stared at me. “What for?”

“We can make sure that drone doesn’t come back. And maybe make them think they got us, and blaze a trail for whoever comes to rescue us.”

Her eyes widened as she understood. “And for the narcos.”

“You think they don’t already have a pretty good idea?”

After a moment she nodded, produced an old-fashioned Motorola Razr from her pocket, and passed it over. I worried it might have been ruined by the rain, I didn’t want to sacrifice my iPhone and its precious GPS and area photo, but the Razr came to life readily enough. I waited just long enough to see if there might be a signal, hoping against hope, but no; so I folded it shut again, turned, and lobbed it onto the the mass grave.

“Come on,” I said. “We better hurry.”

I was still wracked by countless pains and complete physical exhaustion, but I felt a little stronger as we limped on down the trail. Maybe it was the food, or the coca; and maybe it was because I had just done something that might affect the outcome, and so felt like I had once again become, at least in part, the author of my own fate.

A few minutes later we hid in the bush while the drone flashed overhead. Shortly afterwards we heard a hollow bang, more penetrating than loud. It reminded me of explosions you heard sometimes on ski trails, when they tried to set off avalanches in nearby hills. Remembering myself on skis above Lake Tahoe was like remembering a dream of a different world.

“I hope that was a good idea,” Lisa muttered.

I didn’t answer.

Soon the trail intersected another. All directions looked equally unused. In the end we chose the one that seemed to head north, towards the Caribbean, but after five minutes it bent westwards into the heart of the mountains. I wondered if Lisa and I might wander here forever, the Flying Dutchmen of the Colombian jungle, lost for all eternity in this labyrinth of long-abandoned trails carved by those men and women who now lay slaughtered in that mass grave, or perhaps newly scattered by the drone’s detonation.

I couldn’t get the image of that tiny skull out of my head.

We waded across a trickling stream, and then another. The water reignited the agony in my blistered feet but I was grateful for the chance to drink. Then we struggled through an agonizing climb along an endless series of muddy switchbacks to the top of a steep ridge. My legs and lungs both felt filled with molten lava, and ahead of me even Lisa finally began to stagger and stumble. The rest breaks she allowed were never long enough. Sweat soaked my clothes as thoroughly as yesterday’s rain, and halfway up I was already parched with thirst. But I thought of those buried bones and kept going.

A fire had swept through the jungle atop the ridge, reducing it to a sparse and jagged army of charred tree trunks and branches, opening up the view in all directions. In other circumstances the panorama would have been heart-stoppingly gorgeous: snow-capped mountains surrounded by rippling green foothills, pockmarked by waterfalls and chalk-white cliffs, clothed in dense bushes and canopy trees so tall that their pale trunks looked like slender straws. Birds of prey soared across the sky, hawks in ones and twos, vultures in circling clusters. Dark clouds clustered in the north. The trail we had climbed switchbacked down the ridge again before disappearing into jungle.

“Look,” Lisa said urgently, pointing to a relatively wide and flat river about a mile away. There was something moving in the water, coming our way. I squinted in the flat light. Some kind of animal -

“Horses,” I said. At least three of them, being ridden by people. “More locals? Like that kid we saw?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” She looked around, worried. I realized what she was thinking; this burnt-out forest that afforded us the view also left us nowhere to hide. “Let’s not find out. Come on. Move. They’re not far away. Move.”

I realized she didn’t think they were locals. She thought they were the men hunting us. Less than a mile away, coming straight towards us. My breath seemed to stick in my throat. I doubled my pace, almost jogged downhill, skidded and fell on my back and came to my feet again, kept going almost without missing a beat, prodded onwards by the sharp knife of new fear.

Chapter 15

“OK,” Lisa said sharply, once we had left the burnt-out area. “You’re bigger. Get off the trail, go right for about thirty feet, break up the brush as much as you can. Then come back, cross the trail without stepping on it, and try to follow me without leaving any trace. Hurry. They’re on horses.”

I obeyed without discussion, ignored the jungle’s clutching vines and slashing branches, and left the equivalent of a big THIS WAY sign on one side of the trail before doubling back the other way as surreptitiously as possible.

“You think that will work?” I panted a few minutes later, as we thrust our way through a particularly tangled wall of brush.

“It might. At least it will buy us time.”

“Time for what?”

As if on cue, a fat raindrop fell on my outstretched palm.

“Rainy season,” she said simply, and I understood; she was counting on the daily tropical storm to wash away all traces of our true route.

Moments later the skies opened up with the fervour of a convert who had been convinced that all life on Earth should be washed away. At least the water quenched my burning thirst. The jungle caught most of the rain, but enough drizzled onto us that we were soaked again within minutes. By then we had both lost all sense of direction.

“We better stay here.” For the first time I heard exhaustion that rivalled my own in Lisa’s voice. “No sense going around in circles.”

We sat side by side in the best natural shelter we could find, which wasn’t saying much, with our backs against a thick tree trunk, surrounded by the usual cloud of mosquitoes. For a long time neither of us said anything. We were still capable of pushing ourselves onwards in spurts, but once such an exertion ended, for a long period we were too drained to even think, much less speak. I was too tired to even change my position so that water no longer trickled down my neck.

Eventually I said, “Can I have my phone?” She still held it bundled in her jacket.

She looked at me warily. “What for?”

“I’ll switch it to airplane mode so it’s not transmitting. I just want to look at that picture.”

She acquiesced. I called up the photographs I had taken from the helicopter, zoomed in and panned around, trying to work out where we were. Eventually I narrowed it down to an area pathetically near to the schoolhouse. If I was right then we had travelled maybe ten miles since the mortar attack, probably less.

“Here.” I pointed. “Here’s the big river, here’s where I think the helicopter crashed, and here’s the other river we saw from the ridge. It looks like they join together right outside the picture.”

Lisa took the camera, zoomed the picture to maximum, and squinted at the rainwater-filmed screen. She panned from my estimate of our location to the two waterways I had pointed out.

“Looking for gold?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

She handed it back with trembling hands. It wasn’t fear; she was shivering with cold. I had half again her body weight, and thus a more potent internal furnace. I put my arm around her and pulled her close against me. At first her wet skin felt as clammy as a corpse’s, but slowly, despite the cold relentless rain, we managed to warm each other in the places where we could press our bodies together. It was better than nothing.

“My feet are killing me,” I said.

I wasn’t even sure it was hyperbole. They were so swollen that I doubted I could remove my shoes without cutting them off. Even my blisters had blisters. The first ten minutes after every rest stop was like walking on razors and broken glass, until the pain dulled. Now that the rain had washed the mud away my socks were visibly wet with blood, and we were trudging through a jungle teeming with bacteria. It wouldn’t take much for an infected cut to turn to blood poisoning.

I thought of a book I had once read, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in which an American parachuted into South American jungle and joined an uncontacted tribe. His biggest problem had been his feet; his new friends had inch-thick callouses, but he was crippled by his soft, bloody, blistering soles. It had been more realistic than I had known.

“Try to enjoy the moment,” Lisa said.

“Yeah. Right.” I shook my head. “Ancient Chinese proverb say, if you wish to forget about your problems, wear tight shoes. Or cover your feet with fucking blisters.”

“Mine aren’t great either,” she admitted.

I looked at her shoes. “Are those Doc Martens?”

“They are.”

“Is that part of the official federal agent uniform?”

“No. Kind of a reminder, I guess. I used to be a punk, believe it or not.”

“No kidding.” I almost smiled. “You know, when I first met you I figured you for the straitlaced no-nonsense churchgoing fascist type.”

After a moment she said, “Believe it or not, not all churchgoers are fascist.”

“I know,” I said quickly. “I mean – that’s not what I meant.”

“OK. Understood.” She took a breath. “Just so you know, not that it really matters, but I’m pretty religious. In my own way. It’s a big part of my life, maybe the biggest. I just don’t usually talk about it.”

“Sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. You’ve been incredible.”

I grunted with disbelief. “You’re the one doing everything. I’m just following you and trying not to fall over too much.”

“You’re a civilian. You’re not trained for this. Seriously, you’ve been tougher than I could have hoped.”

“I bet you say that to all the civilians. Part of your survival training, right? Keeping up morale?”

She smiled weakly. “It is. But I mean it, too.”

“Well. Thanks.”

We rested in silence for a moment.

“Do you think we’re going to get out of this?” I asked. And when she opened her mouth: “Don’t do the morale thing. A serious answer. Please.”

She paused to consider her answer, which already told me all I needed to know.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think there’s more of them behind us, too, upstream is narco territory, that’s why I didn’t turn back when we saw the horses. So they’re all around us now, and they’ll be watching all the trails. We can’t hide in the jungle or count on the rain to cover our tracks forever. No sign of rescue since the helicopter. I don’t know.” She took a deep breath. “Listen. James. In case the situation arises. I’m responsible for this, I did this to you, I told you you would be safe. You’re a civilian, I’m a soldier. So it doesn’t matter what happens to me, you understand? My duty, my only duty, is to keep you alive and get you out of this. So if it comes down to you or me, you don’t hesitate. Get yourself out. Understand?”

I didn’t answer.

“Understand?”

I nodded, slowly.

“Good.”

“If they catch us, do you think they’ll kill us?” Actually saying the words brought the stark desperation of our situation home to me again. I couldn’t believe that such a question was actually germane to my life.

“Maybe. I don’t know. They might take us hostage, like the FARC. They’ve had some people in the jungle for fifteen years. Former senators, police chiefs, military officers. Two Americans would make for pretty good bargaining chips.”

“I’m Canadian.”

“Oh, well, never mind then, they’ll just waste you on sight.”

I smiled grimly.

“No. I don’t think they’ll kill us. They probably won’t even mistreat you too much, is my guess.”

“You said they’d cut my dick off and make me eat it,” I pointed out.

“That was sort of… speculative incentivization.”

“Nice phrase.”

“Thanks. I mean, who knows. You’re a Canadian civilian, a man. You might be tortured to death, you might be treated OK. Depends on what kind of animals they are. Me, an American, a DEA agent, a woman… I’d really rather not find out what kind of entertainments they might have in store if they catch me alive.” I didn’t even want to think about it. “So I don’t intend to let that happen. Don’t get defeatist. We’ve still got a strong chance. You might be back in your girlfriend’s arms tomorrow.”

The idea of being with Sophie in our warm safe bed was so piercing, and so different from the awful and agonizing reality of my situation, that I wanted to cry.

“What about you?” I asked, eager to change the subject. “You got a boyfriend waiting for you?” A thought occurred to me. “Or a girlfriend?”

“No. No boyfriend.” Lisa sighed. “Lately I’ve been kind of married to my job. I don’t know. The older I get, the angrier I get.”

“At who?”

She shrugged. “Us and them both. Our crazy drug laws and the dealers who live off them. Fucking vampires. My mother, when I was a kid I saw her go from occasional user to addict, and they just fed off her, they bled her dry, body and soul. You know what it’s like to have your mother bringing tricks home? To have them trying to make nice to you after, while she’s still in her room crying?” Her voice was steely with ancient fury. “No. Of course you don’t. You grew up in a nice nuclear family, didn’t you. I can tell. Lucky you. You know what the hard part is, sometimes? Not shooting them when I bust them. Especially when they’ve got weapons and I could claim it as self-defence. No one would investigate, even if they knew. It’s always so tempting. It’s all they deserve.”

I didn’t reply.

“You don’t agree, huh?”

I quoted Tolkien: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”

“Easy for someone like you to say,” she said savagely, and immediately winced. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap. I’m just kind of end of my tether here.”

“Understood. No worries. Me too.”

“Anyway, I like Clint Eastwood’s take better. ‘Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.’” She rose to her feet. “Come on. The rain’s easing up. We better get moving.”

But we didn’t get far.

Chapter 16

Three waterfalls fell like pale and graceful veils down a rocky cliff. The pool of water at their base drained into a wide river that was fast but smooth, with only a few whitewater eddies. A tangle of driftwood the size of a tractor-trailer had formed where the pool met the river; logs swept over the waterfall had caught up on several large boulders there and accumulated into what looked like a roc’s nest, or the biggest game of Pick-Up-Stix ever played. Something had carved a weird muddy hollow the size of a pickup truck into the grassy riverbank next to the logs.

“You think we can cross that?” I asked doubtfully, looking at the jumbled bridge of trunks and branches. It didn’t look stable.

To my relief Lisa shook her head.

“Maybe we can go behind the waterfall,” I suggested. “In fantasy novels there’s usually a secret tunnel that leads to the dragon’s lair or something.”

She gave me a worried look.

“Don’t worry, I’m not delirious, I’m always like this,” I assured her.

“Oh. Well. No, I don’t think so. But there’s a ford, or a stepping-stone bridge, or something, at the trail crossing. Where we saw the horses, from the ridge.”

I looked downstream and inwardly cringed at the thought of bushwhacking through yet more jungle. But it didn’t seem we had a choice -

“Wait,” she said thoughtfully.

I waited.

Eventually she said, “I don’t think time is on our side. Sooner or later they’ll find us. Probably sooner. We can’t count on another rescue attempt. They probably figure we’re already dead. If we don’t do something to change this game, we’re going to lose it.”

She turned and looked at the untidy heap of logs that spanned the river.

“You just said you didn’t think we could cross that,” I objected.

“I’m not talking about crossing it.”

“Then what?”

“I think we should make a raft.”

I stared at her, then at the logs, then at the fast-running river. It was wide and deep as far as we could see. But beyond, especially when it merged with that first river – I thought of that whitewater, those jagged rocks, and shivered. If it was like that we would be lucky to survive two minutes.

“I know,” she said. “It’s a desperate choice. But I think we’re desperate.”

“Speak for yourself. Me, I’m way past desperate.” It was intended as a joke, but it didn’t come out that way.

“We’re in this together. If you say no, I won’t do it. But I think it’s our best shot.”

“You think they won’t see us on a raft?”

“Not if we go at night.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, appalled.

She waited.

“I feel like I’m on Survivor,” I muttered. “Except they decided to spice up this series with guns and UAVs and fucking murderous Colombian drug cartels. So it’s build a raft and sail down the river of doom in the middle of the night, or keep wandering through the jungle hoping they don’t find us, is that it?”

“Pretty much.”

I took a deep breath. It occurred to me that this could be the biggest decision of my life. But, I reassured myself, on the other and far more likely hand, we were probably screwed either way. “Fuck it. If ‘twere done when ‘twere done, then ‘twere best ‘twere done quickly.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning,” I said, “let’s go surfing.”

The raft was surprisingly easy to build. Between the logpile and the jungle we had a whole cornucopia of building materials, and Lisa’s knife was sharp. We used vines as ropes, but our faith in them was limited, so we cannibalized most of our clothes into strips to strengthen the knots.

Beneath her T-shirt she had several tattoos: a Celtic knot on her lower back, a skull around her navel, flames on one shoulder and a bird of prey on another. I examined her revealed body with unconcealed curiosity; we were way past any physical modesty. It looked sculpted out of metal, wiry verging on gaunt. The abdominal muscles beneath her skull tattoo belonged on a magazine cover, if their scrapes and scratches were airbrushed out. We were both covered with nicks and bruises, whole landscapes of contusions.

“I was a punk,” she said, noting my look, “and then I was in the Army.” She grinned. “You think these tats are bad, you should see the ones you can’t see yet.”

I held my hands up in an I-surrender way. “I don’t even want to know.”

Rather than take my shoes off I had Lisa carefully cut the legs free of my jeans. “Please be especially careful,” I said, as she worked the knife around the inside of my legs. My own body had noticeably grown less puffy over the last couple of days too. “Do they have to be short-shorts? I’ll look like I’m cruising the Castro.”

“Maybe you should be quiet and not distract the woman holding a razor-sharp blade inches from your precious genitals,” she suggested.

Once we had finished reinforcing our improvised vessel we had nothing left but the ragged remnants of our clothes, her knife and gun, and my wallet and phone. I stared at that paltry pile stacked on a rock by the side of the river. In that context they looked like artifacts of a civilization from another world.

“The gun might still work,” Lisa said beside me. She had taken it apart and cleaning it as best she could. “But with all the mud and rain I can’t be sure. And if we go over, it’ll definitely be useless. So will your phone.”

A bad thought occurred to me. “We’re going to fucking freeze on that thing. That water is cold.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure the rapids will kill us first.”

I gave her a look.

We stood in silence for a long moment, staring at the flimsy creation we intended to ride down this surging mountain river into the unknown. Our raft was about six feet long and four wide, profoundly uncomfortable and studded with countless splinters. To guide it we had two longish, flattish post-like trunks, equally unsuitable for poling and paddling. Whitewater rafting regularly killed people with expensive custom-built rafts, lifejackets, helmets, professional equipment and trained guides. Our plan was utter madness.

But it was too late to turn back; we had sacrificed our clothes, we were committed. The sun had descended behind the western hills, a bite had entered the mountain air, and I was already shivering. Another full night up here without shelter or fire and hypothermia would get us.

“Look on the bright side,” she said. “It’s almost a new moon.”

“That is almost by definition not the bright side,” I pointed out. “We won’t be able to fucking see anything.”

“Neither will they. Do you think we should tie ourselves down to it?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

We stared at each other.

“This is completely batshit insane, you realize,” I said.

“I know. What can I say. Crazy times call for crazy measures.”

“Right.” I bit back a lament about ever having left California. I already knew Lisa felt awful about having brought me here. No need to twist that knife.

We sat beside our raft, and as the sun set we huddled shivering together, partly for warmth, partly just to hold each other against what we were about to attempt. I closed my eyes.

Then I felt Lisa’s entire body stiffen against mine as if shocked by a thousand volts.

I knew without opening my eyes what had happened. They had found us. We had done our best, we had tried our hardest, but it wasn’t enough, the fates and stars were against us. It was almost a relief. At least now we could stop running.

“Uh,” Lisa said in a strangled voice, “uh, James?”

There was terror in her voice, but something else, too, a kind of what-the-fuck astonishment that penetrated my despair. So I opened my eyes.

And my jaw fell open, too, as I gaped at the gigantic dark mass of flesh coming out of the river towards us, via that strange muddy hollow in the riverbank. Its monstrous, bulbous body was the size of a car. It had fangs the size of my forearm set in its wet pink maw. I was so exhausted, and the beast was so out of place, that for a moment I thought it some horrific mutation, or even an alien invasion.

Then I recognized it; but that recognition did not make the sighting any less surreal. We held each other tightly and stared motionlessly as the impossible creature wallowed out of the river, staring at us balefully. We held our breath. After an endless moment it adjusted its course just enough to veer around us, close enough that I could have reached out and touched its wet hide. Finally it disappeared into the jungle.

Slowly we began to relax.

I said, disbelievingly, “Was that a hippopotamus?”

Lisa nodded.

“No,” I said, “no it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, they’re not native to South America, they’re African.”

“Escobar,” she said. “The drug lord. The drug lord to end all drug lords, Forbes named him one of the ten wealthiest men alive, he singlehandedly brought the Colombian state to one knee. He brought hippos to his private zoo, and after he died, after we hunted him down, they escaped and started to breed. That must have been one of their children.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty.”

“Welcome to Colombia. It’s hard for people who haven’t been here to understand, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he mostly writes nonfiction.”

I nodded slowly. “Maybe it was a good omen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe so. Let’s hope.”

We waited. The streaks of clouds turned crimson, then cotton-candy pink, then pale again. A star appeared in the sky, and another.

“James, if we don’t make it, or even if we do, I’m really sorry,” Lisa said in a low voice. “I just want you to know that. I’m so sorry.”

I impulsively kissed her forehead. “You’re not responsible. It was bad luck.”

But it hadn’t been. Someone had set us up. The ambush at the school had been intended for Sophie, I was almost sure of it, and somehow related to Michael Kostopoulos. But there was no sense speculating now.

“You ready?” she asked.

I nodded. She kissed my cheek and got up. I followed her lead. I was already half-numb with cold, almost fell as we carried the raft to the river. It occurred to me that we hadn’t even tested it to see if it could support our strength, and that just boarding it would be tricky.

“You first,” she said.

Her muscles strained with the effort of keeping the raft steady against the riverbank. I took a breath, concentrated, prayed to whatever gods might be that I wouldn’t screw this up like I had screwed up crossing the first river, and crawled onto it on all fours. It rocked queasily but held me. I added a quick addendum prayer for no more hippos. I knew they killed more people every year than crocodiles.

“Go a little bit further,” Lisa ordered.

I reluctantly obeyed. Just as the raft began to tip precipitously in my direction, and I gasped with dismay, she stepped on beside me and quickly dropped to hands and knees, righting it. The shore drifted away; and as the last rays of sunlight slipped away from the earth, we began to coast downriver.

Chapter 17

Our combined weight drove the raft deep enough that water seeped up between the logs. I grabbed a loose vine-end and wished we had built in handles. In the faint starlight I could make out the line of termination between water and air, but the walls of foliage on either side were like moving shadows, motion without form. At first the ride was remarkably smooth, almost like bobbing up and down in still water while the land churned past on rails.

I was shivering and starving and I hurt all over, but I commanded my brain to ignore my body’s distress signals. The only good thing about this mad Mark Twain journey was that one way or another it would be over relatively soon. All I had to do was endure for, I hoped, a day more at most. Unless we fell off the raft, and got separated in the darkness, and I washed up on the shore and found myself alone and nearly naked in the jungle. The prospect seemed terrifyingly plausible. I tightened my grip on the vine.

A burbling sound grew suddenly louder, and we hit a standing wave. I gasped as the raft rocked, but we did not overturn or begin to break apart. A flickering light appeared in the distance, a fire in the jungle, not far away. The foliage silhouetted in that dim light looked like the outline of an HP Lovecraft nightmare, a dark mass covered with waving tentacles.

“That must be them,” Lisa murmured. “The narcos.”

We passed within a few hundred feet of their campfire. I didn’t see the riverbank trailhead, but it must have been near. The river widened again, and I began to breathe easier, until we bumped into a rock or deadhead log lurking just below the surface, which nearly knocked me into the water, and sent us into a slow spin.

“Just stay low,” Lisa said. “We’re going to be OK.”

I had my doubts. My teeth were beginning to chatter, my fingertips were growing numb, and I didn’t dare move for fear of falling off or overturning the raft. “Lisa, just for the record, this is without question the stupidest fucking thing I have ever done.”

“And you’re not even getting paid for it. At least I’m on duty here.”

I forced a chortle. “Exactly.”

“Remember the Stoics. Try to enjoy the moment.”

“Fuck the Stoics.” But I tried anyways, and almost succeeded. I was miserable, but I was still breathing, still alive, and that was still cause for celebration.

We both fell silent as a rushing sound began to grow in the distance. It sounded almost like cars on a distant highway, but we knew it was whitewater. We were about to join the big river, the one that had already nearly killed me.

The noise swelled in volume. Even in the near-total darkness we could see the pale froth of the rapids ahead, glistening in starlight. It was even worse than I had feared. I heard a whimpering noise and realized a moment later it had come from my own throat. My heart sank and my stomach writhed as if I was falling.

“Hang on,” she muttered, unnecessarily.

Then we hit the whitewater mainstream, and the raft immediately overturned.

I somehow held on to the vine as I bounced off one rock and was scraped against the length of another. The raft hit a boulder with an audible clunk and something relatively soft plunged into my midsection. It wasn’t until I came up gasping for air until I realized that it had been one of Lisa’s limbs. I managed to grab the raft and steer myself behind it, so it would take the brunt of any new impact. I didn’t know where Lisa was, but there was no time to worry, another stretch of violent whitewater lay just ahead.

Those rapids began with a sheer ten-foot drop. As I whirled in the churning waters of the pool beneath, buffeted on all sides, the loop of vine slipped from my hand. I was dragged underwater and held for several long seconds, trapped between two irresistible currents, until in my panicked thrashing I kicked a rock, shattered the equilibrium, and popped like a cork back into the main flow. The river flung me downstream and suddenly I was drifting in smooth deep water again.

“Lisa!” I called out hoarsely, treading water. “Lisa!”

I barely heard her voice over the rushing water: “James! Are you OK?”

“More or less! Where are you?”

“This way!”

“I lost the raft!” I shouted, splashing my way in the general direction of her voice.

“I’ve got it!”

“I can’t see anything!”

For a moment she didn’t answer. Then, with an edge of near-hysterical laughter in her voice, she shouted out, “Marco!”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Polo!”

“Marco!”

“Polo!”

The ancient game led me to her. It was so dark that I touched the raft before I saw it, the found her in the water behind it.

“You think we should get on?” I asked.

“I think we’ll be safer and warmer staying in and kicking.”

She had a point; my recent frenzied struggle to stay alive had at least defeated the creeping cold preying on my bones. And the water was arguably warmer than the air.

My shoes dragged my feet downwards, and I soon gave up, contorted myself while hanging onto the raft with one hand, and peeled them off. The river swallowed my tears of agony.

We drifted half-submersed for a long time. Slowly the water leeched the heat from our bodies despite our attempts to keep kicking. I almost didn’t mind, numbness dulled the pain from my feet, but I knew intellectually that this was a bad sign. A memory leapt into my mind, something I had seen on TV when I was a kid, a special program about some girl who had swum across Lake Ontario. I thought dizzily, If she can make it, I can make it, redoubled the pace of my weary legs, and concentrated on breathing deeply like Lisa had told me. It seemed to help a little. I told myself that I had it easy compared to Lake Ontario, I didn’t have lampreys attacking me and sucking my blood. Although Colombia had alligators. And maybe piranha. I froze for a second, then reassured myself that there would be no predators in water moving this fast.

“How are you doing?” I muttered, realizing dimly that we hadn’t spoken in a while. There had been no rapids since the rivers had joined, and it was hard to tell, but I thought the river was widening and the water slowing. I wondered how deep it was.

“About as well as you might expect.”

We drifted onwards.

“Try to enjoy the moment.” It was growing hard to decipher her words. “The Stoics say it’s possible to be happy even as you are stretched upon the rack.”

“They are of course full of shit.”

She didn’t answer. I feared she didn’t remember having quoted the Stoics to me before. Not a good sign. Delirium and confusion were signs of hypothermia.

“Penny for your thoughts,” I said, hoping that talking might keep up her strength.

For a second I was worried she couldn’t answer, but she took a deep breath and said, “You know when I was in the army I tried to join the Special Forces?”

“Of course. Everyone knows that. I read it in People magazine.”

I could almost feel her glare through the darkness. “Less sarcasm, more listening, Kowalski.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, glad to have irritated her. Anger made you warm.

“I thought I was some kind of badass. So I signed up. As part of the training they taught us mental techniques for how to endure physical strain. They did this thing where we had to stand holding our rifle above our heads for, I don’t know, forever. You ever try to hold something above your head for a long time?”

“No.”

“It’s fucking awful. The Stoics never tried to join the Special Forces, I’ll tell you that much. Anyway. One of the other tricks is to think of what you win if you endure. Something concrete. That’s why I dropped out. You were supposed to think about joining the Special Forces, that was what you won. But I realized, I didn’t actually want to be a Green Beret, I just wanted to have been a Green Beret. Not the same thing.” She sucked in a harsh breath. Her voice was growing increasingly slurred. “Sorry. Babbling. My point is. You keep thinking about your girlfriend. You get through this, you get her.”

I realized that Lisa was near the end of her considerable strength.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked, hoping to help her tap into a new reserve.

For some time she didn’t answer. I was about to repeat myself when she said, in an uncertain voice unlike any I’d heard before from her, “That’s the fucking question, isn’t it? I got no one waiting for me back home. Between you and me and the big guy, all I got right now is the rosary.”

“The rosary?”

“In my head. Except I can’t remember the fucking Apostle’s Creed.”

After a second I began to recite, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried… “

She spoke it along with me. We were both panting at first, barely audible, but our joined voices grew stronger.

“I figured you for atheist,” she said, when we were done.

“I am,” I admitted, oddly embarrassed. “But I grew up Catholic.”

“They say there are no atheists in a foxhole.”

“They are of course full of shit.”

She managed a croaking laugh at that.

We didn’t speak again until the sun rose. There were several more sets of rapids, but none as violent as the first. We grew numb, but somehow found the strength to keep kicking. And as the first light of dawn began to stain the earth, we came to rest in a shallow bend, not far from an obviously artificial stepping-stone bridge, from which a trail led onwards into the bush.

We staggered mindlessly up it, past swarming convoys of ants, until we reached two parallel trails of red mud spaced about four feet apart, with ragged grass growing between them like a Mohawk haircut. I was so dazed and detached from reality that it took me several seconds to realize it was a road, carved out by some kind of motorized vehicle. We had reached the network of roads that defines the remit of civilization.

From the top of the next hill we saw concrete walls, tin roofs, and electrical wires, and began to stumble towards them with no thought of safety or secrecy. We were beyond such abstractions. It was just animal survival. And if I had been alone, I probably wouldn’t have survived; I passed out halfway to the town.

The next few hours were hazy and disjointed in my memory, a kaleidoscope of images as I passed in and out of consciousness. Lisa and two darkskinned women splashing water on my face, urgent voices in a musical language I did not understand. Men carrying me in an improvised stretcher made of a big plastic sheet; I wanted to complain petulantly about the rough texture and crinkling noises, but wasn’t capable of speech. The terrifying sight of my own feet, like pulped meat from a slaughterhouse. Lying in the back of a pickup truck as it traversed the world’s worst and longest dirt road, while Lisa hovered over me, wrapped in a thick woolen blanket and sitting on the spare tire, holding my hand and telling me I was going to be all right, even when I turned my head and vomited weakly over her feet. And, finally, what looked like a whole battalion of soldiers waiting at the junction where that awful dirt road finally met pavement.

I screamed weakly when I saw them. In my delirium it took me long seconds to understand that they weren’t the enemy come to kill us.

Chapter 18

My next continuous set of memories began in a modern and spacious hospital room. My feet were swathed in bandages, my countless cuts had scabbed over, my bruises were yellowing, and an IV was plugged into my arm. I guessed from the machines’ Spanish signs and labels that I was still in Colombia. Lisa sat dozing in a chair in the corner, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Her face was mottled with livid scabs, but otherwise she seemed almost unaffected by our ordeal. A red sun was visible through the window, but I couldn’t tell if it was dawn or dusk.

“Hey,” I said weakly. “Lisa.”

Her eyes fluttered open, and she sat up very straight. “You’re up!”

I had so many questions I didn’t know where to begin. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Morning.”

“You’ve been there all night?”

She shrugged as if it was no big deal. “We’re in Barranquilla. Big city on the coast. How you feeling?”

“Fine.” And it was true, I was weak but hale. Except – “How are my feet?” I dreaded and half-expected news of permanent damage.

“Oh, they’ll be fine.” Lisa seemed surprised by my concern. “Mostly just blisters and swelling, there was some infection but that’s gone now. They put some second skin stuff on you, said it was fine for you to walk. It’ll probably still hurt though.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days.”

“Whoa. Really?”

“You had an electrolyte balance problem. Like marathon runners who collapse. It was touch and go for a bit, but it turns out you’re tough as old nails.”

“Go me.”

“Indeed.”

“Where’s Sophie?”

“Back in the States. She wanted to come but they wouldn’t let her. Security. Totally unnecessary, you ask me, but the Colombians are embarrassed enough as is. You’re supposed to call her the moment you’re up.”

“When can I go home?”

“Soon as the doctors say. If you’re feeling fine then probably tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” I repeated. “Tomorrow sounds good.”

“Want me to get you a phone?”

“Yes, please.”

Her tone had been cordially distant, law enforcement professional to civilian; but she hesitated on the way to the door, came over, took my hand, squeezed it, and said quietly, “Good to have you back.”

I smiled at her. “I’ve got you to thank for it.”

Her face clouded. “You’ve got me to thank for almost dying.”

When she returned and handed me a cell phone – one with a button marked SECURE, I noticed – Sophie was already on the line.

“Hey, you,” she said.

“Hey, you.”

“It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Yours too.”

The words were banal but both our voices were throbbing with emotion.

“They say you’re OK,” she said. “Do you feel OK?”

“Yeah. My feet, I don’t know, I haven’t tried walking yet. But otherwise yeah. I probably look like hell though.”

“You do,” Lisa assured me. I gave her a mock-hurt look. “Sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”

“Who’s that?” Sophie asked, as Lisa departed.

“Lisa. Agent Reyes. She was with me, did they tell you the story?”

“Mostly. You know they sent me back here and wouldn’t let me come see you?”

“Yeah.”

An odd and uncomfortable silence fell. I wondered if Sophie had known we might be attacked in Colombia, courtesy of the secrets she had kept from me.

“I was sick with worry,” Sophie said. “Literally sick. I couldn’t sleep. I’m just, I’m so glad you’re all right, I can’t even express it. I miss you so much already. Come home as soon as you can, OK?”

“They say it might be tomorrow.”

“Good. Good.”

I remembered why we had come to Colombia in the first place. “Did you get anything out of that drone?”

“Yeah. I got away with the control module.”

“And?”

“It’s an Axon.” The brand name Sophie had bestowed upon the neural networks she had invented. “Based on my designs. No doubt.”

I almost said Jesse, then realized that this was a government phone, and we should probably construct our strategy in private first. “Well, we can talk about it when I get back.”

“Yeah.”

Another awkward silence that I didn’t really understand. But then it was a strange situation. Just then I didn’t feel like I understood anything, except maybe, courtesy of the ordeal I had just survived, just how fragile and fleeting and precious life was. Compared to that, Sophie’s secrets suddenly didn’t seem so important – but then, neither did our relationship. It was suddenly strangely easy to imagine life without her.

“OK. I’ll call you when I know when I’m arriving, OK?” I asked, forcing a bright tone.

“Sounds good. Talk to you then.” She hesitated, and then blurted out, as if the words were escaping from her against her will, “I love you, James.”

“I love you too,” I said.

But for the first time in years, I wondered what exactly I meant by that.

Chapter 19

“Well?” Lisa asked.

I took an experimental step. “You know what, it’s not bad.”

I had watched with trepidation while the brusquely efficient Colombian doctor removed the bandages on my feet, but three days of healing and medicine had left them only a little raw. Swathed with second skin, and enclosed in supportive orthopedic shoes which made me look like I had gorilla feet, they only felt a little bruised.

“Blisters heal fast,” she assured me. “You’ll be running again in a week.”

“Like hell. I am going to spend the next month imitating the offspring of a sloth and a snail.”

She smiled. “Want to go shopping first?”

“Seriously?”

She shrugged. “Flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow, we’ve got all day to kill, Doctor says you’re fine to go out. I thought you might like real food and civilization.”

“Yes, please.”

A battered taxi took us from the hospital’s shabby and crowded entrance through busy streets, some clean and lined with villas, some of them rotting slums, to the monumental El Prado mall. Inside all was gleaming order and shiny neon brands. Stylish shoppers drifted in packs. I couldn’t believe I was in the same country as the jungle we had barely survived. It felt like some kind of fantasy-novel parallel retail dimension.

“There’s supposed to be a good restaurant not far from here,” she said after I finished buying new clothes with money from the ATM card that had miraculously survived our jungle ordeal. “A place where Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to hang out when he lived here.”

“Screw that. I’ve had enough cultural authenticity to last me a lifetime, thank you very much.” I pointed to the food court. “I want McDonald’s and ice cream, and I want it now.”

I was just finishing my mint-chip cone when Lisa’s phone warbled.

Whatever she heard turned her expression serious in a hurry. She listened for a minute, then said, tersely, “Yes, sir. We’re on our way.”

She hung up and stood up, all business again, alert and ready for action.

“On our way where?” I asked.

“Washington.”

“What? Why?”

Lisa said, “About ninety minutes ago the head of the DEA was assassinated in his home not a mile from the White House. By a drone.”

Part 2. Hispaniola

Chapter 20

We didn’t even go through immigration. Two men in dark suits met us at the gate and hustled us through Authorized Personnel Only doors, down featureless hallways, and into a dark sedan that whisked us across the Potomac to a chrome-and-glass complex that looked like the headquarters of a moderately successful software company. There we were ushered into an office barren except for a briefcase on the floor, a laptop on the steel desk, and the two people waiting for us. One was a short wide man with an air of authority and a shock of black curly hair. The other was Sophie.

When she saw me she rushed over, grabbed me and gave me a long, deep kiss, heedless of our officious audience. I held her so tightly I had to ease off after a second for fear of cracking a rib.

“Hey, you,” she whispered, brushing tears from her eyes as I smiled through my own. “Good to see you.”

I murmured, “You too.”

Sophie turned to Lisa and said, heartfelt, “Thank you.”

Lisa’s smile seemed uncomfortable. “Any time.”

“Terry Clark.” The short man stood to shake my hand. His grip was powerful, and his smile seemed to have too many teeth in it, like a shark’s. “So you’re the civilian who aced our improvised jungle survival course. And you’re Agent Reyes. Well done. I’ve already put you in for a commendation. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“You too, sir. Thank you very much.” Lisa seemed starstruck, as if in the presence of royalty; she all but curtsied and saluted after shaking his hand.

Clark turned back to Sophie and I. “Welcome to the alphabet soup. We’ve got quite a task force assembled here. DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, there’s even an ATF guy, don’t ask me why, plus Homeland Security, State Department, Pentagon, Secret Service, and probably a dogcatcher who fixes kitchen sinks. I have the dubious honour of being the ringmaster of this clusterfuck circus, and I have called you two here to ask you a favour on behalf of your country.”

I wanted to ask, Canada needs my help? What’s wrong, are the Habs and Leafs tanking again?, but decided silence was wiser than sarcasm.

“What we have on our hands here,” he continued, “is a major national security crisis. Drug cartels murdering the head of the DEA in his home. We have reason to believe that the weapons they are using were supplied to them by your laboratory’s clients. The so-called Convoy Emerging Wealth Fund.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Based on what evidence?” I asked, and returned Sophie’s let-me-do-the-talking look with a warning glare of my own. I was glad to see her, but after what I had just been through I wasn’t about to stay quiet for anybody, or let a claim that Jesse was involved in a criminal conspiracy go unchallenged.

Clark said, “Aside from the remarkable similarities between the drones you built for Convoy and those used by the cartels, there’s their location.”

I blinked. “Their location?”

Sophie said, “I’ve been helping the DEA look for drones. Went through their satellite photo archives with our Axons.” Her neural networks weren’t just good for keeping UAVs aloft and tracking radio signals or sunken treasure; they were powerful general-purpose pattern-recognition machines. Spotting instances of a particular image in a vast haystack of data was exactly the kind of problem at which they excelled. “We’ve found silhouettes of whole squadrons of drones flying across the Caribbean towards the USA. Thirty a day, every day, going back for more than a year.”

I whistled with surprise.

Then I said, “Wait a second.” That didn’t make any sense. “Across the Caribbean? From Colombia? No way. Those drones can’t fly that far unless they’ve invented a whole new generation of fuel cell while they’re at it.” I was confident about that much; this was my area of expertise.

“Exactly. I’m guessing they can go maybe four hundred miles when loaded. Which just happens to be the distance from Colombia to Haiti, and from Haiti to Florida.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Jesse and Anya had been operating out of Haiti for the last six months.

“We have a few shots of drones flying north from Colombia, too,” Sophie said. “Figure they go from there to Haiti, recharge during the day, then on to Florida the next night, navigating via GPS, low and under the radar. If carbon-fibre frames that small show up on radar at all. They’re not much bigger than frigate birds. Land them in the Everglades, unload them, send them back to Colombia for more. Two-day trip each way, thirty drones reaching the USA every day. That means a hundred and twenty drones, carrying a cumulative payload of forty tons of drugs over the last year.” I whistled again. “We haven’t found any shots of the return trip yet. It probably won’t help, I’m sure all the launch and landing sites change frequently.” She shook her head with something like admiration. “Drones solve the smuggling problem, simple as that. Unstoppable and untraceable. Even if the occasional one gets intercepted, it can’t testify.”

“The bottom line,” Clark said grimly, “is that these jokers have a hundred and twenty drones they can bring into America and pack with Semtex instead of cocaine any time they like. Are you beginning to get the picture here?”

“Yes,” I said, half-chastened, “but that’s still only circumstantial evidence against Convoy. Nothing tangible.”

“No. You’re quite right. We don’t have any real evidence, and even if we did, they’re a British corporation, directed by a Canadian and a Russian, operating out of Haiti, with a Liberian-registered ship anchored in international waters. Going after them would be a legal nightmare.”

“You can’t just say they’re ‘enemy combatants’ and disappear them like in the good old days?” I asked.

Nobody seemed to find my joke at all funny.

“Mr. Kowalski. You need to understand the situation here.” Clark’s demeanour changed from charmer to street fighter. “Bad enough when the cartels were assassinating DEA agents and Colombian and Mexican officials on their soil. Now they have murdered a presidential appointee in his home. This is already a Category Three shitstorm. His wife and four-year-old daughter are in critical condition with shrapnel wounds. The press are already all over it, and they still think it was a bomb someone planted. When they find out it had wings they’ll go berserk. These cartels can go after anyone they want with these things, anyone, and there’s not a damn thing we can do except turn off our phones and pray. We need to nip this thing in the bud before it turns into the Katrina of all shitstorms. Our military supremacy is built on technical supremacy, and we have just been blindsided and leapfrogged. I’ve spent two days hearing people tell me that our UAVs are years behind these drones. Our forces don’t believe in autonomous weapons. They’re worried they could go rogue and kill innocents. A reasonable concern, but not one that terrorists share. We can’t let that give them the edge. We need to go after them with everything we’ve got. Off the record, we don’t want to go extra-legal here, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t conceivable.”

I went cold as I realized what he meant. My joke had flopped because it was no joke at all: the US government was seriously considering having Jesse and Anya snatched up without arrest or trial.

“Extra-legal?” Sophie sounded incredulous too. “As in kidnapping and torture?”

Clark’s eyes went steely. “Miss Warren -“

“Dr. Warren, if you please.”

“Dr. Warren. This administration does not torture.”

“But it might be willing to kidnap foreign citizens without even charging them with anything. Or maybe just get the Haitians to pick them up for you. I’m sure they’d be very careful to ask questions very nicely. That way you wouldn’t even have to worry about any pesky judges. Good thing, too, because last I checked, kidnapping people on the high seas was called piracy. So state-sponsored piracy is OK, but torture is not. Kind of a fine line, don’t you think?” The volume of Sophie’s voice remained unchanged, but its tone was growing ever colder and more furious. “And what exactly do you mean when you say anything is ‘off the record’? Did I miss the memo where you suspended the First Amendment? If we tell people what you just said, do we get disappeared too? I’m just curious. I’d just like to know what the new ground rules are now that the Constitution apparently no longer applies.”

This didn’t really seem like the time and place to erupt into an irate lecture on civil liberties, but I was proud of her for being so entirely unintimidated. There was something to be said for holding the entire rest of the planet in intellectual contempt.

“Dr. Warren,” Clark said, “really, there’s no need for any histrionics.” Sophie gave him a flat look which I knew meant If I could kill you with my brain, your heart would no longer be beating. “Convoy is an investigative target, not an immediate threat. Their technology is in the wrong hands now whether we like it or not. No point burning down the barn when the horse is already gone. What we’re hoping they might provide is information about where exactly it went. It’s precisely in the hope of not having to make any decisions regarding extra-legality that we’re asking you to go down there.”

Sophie and I said, in stereo, “What?”

“We need to find out who is behind these attacks and where they are, fast.”

“Don Mario,” Lisa said. “Almost certainly.”

I blinked, turned to her. “Don Mario?” It sounded like a name out of pulp fiction.

“Colombia’s biggest drug lord. Real name Daniel Barrera. Has a personal army of an estimated six thousand sicarios. Hit men. Owns who knows how many Colombian judges and senators and cops. It’s got to be either him or whoever replaced Rendon, his big rival.”

“We’re not ready to make assumptions about who,” Clark corrected her. Lisa looked chastened, like a priest rebuked by the Pope. “The truth is we don’t know anything yet. Convoy is one of our few leads, and you’re our only existing connection to them. We’d like you to think of a reason to visit them, immediately.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Nothing cloak and dagger. Just keep your eyes open and report back on anything you discover. Don’t get me wrong. The fate of the nation does not rest on your success. We have dozens of other investigatory fronts open already. But anything you unearth could save who knows how many lives, and prevent a national panic. In the past we’ve called the cartels narco-terrorists mostly because that made it easier to get funding from Congress. But now we mean it. If they start murdering law enforcement officials around the country with apparent impunity, just imagine the chaos.”

“Sounds bad,” Sophie said coldly. “Why, it’s enough to give me the itch to throw out the Constitution and start getting serious about things.”

“Look, Dr. Warren,” Clark said, “if you have a problem with me, I apologize. I shouldn’t have expressed my personal views, which aren’t relevant, as obviously I’m not the one who makes those decisions. If you’d rather, then I will take you down to the Oval Office right now, and the man who does make those decisions will personally make this very same request. That’s how important this is to us.”

He didn’t sound like he was bluffing. He sounded like he was one word away from taking us to see the most powerful man in the world.

I suspected from Sophie’s speculative expression that she was actually quite willing to go spy on Convoy for the government, but first she wanted to go visit the White House, just for fun. That didn’t sound like a good idea to me. Meeting the President and making him ask nicely for our help purely for our own entertainment felt like trespassing on Mount Olympus during a thunderstorm.

“We could say we’re going to calibrate the drones,” I suggested, before she could say anything. “For the new design. Just for a few days.”

Sophie frowned, looked at me, sighed, acquiesced: “OK, fine.”

“Good.” Clark looked relieved, and hurried to change the topic before she changed her mind. “Now tell me about this kill switch. My staff tell me you might be able to turn their drones off remotely.”

Sophie paused, visibly trying to figure out how best to communicate with this tech-illiterate barbarian. “Maybe. There is a kill switch built into every Axon in case we need to shut them down, but don’t get the wrong idea, I can’t just shout ‘Klaatu barada nikto!’ and watch all their drones fall out of the sky.”

I smiled at the reference. Clark looked puzzled.

“Think of a drone as a cell phone with wings,” Sophie said. “Imagine that if you send it a particular text message, it will switch off and stay off. That’s the kill switch. But you have to be able to connect to send that message, like a cell tower connects to your phone. So I’d need to know the details of its communications protocol, and the appropriate keys if its control channel is encrypted, which it probably is. Given that, yes, we could shut down all their drones. But that’s a lot to ask.”

“Interesting.” Clark considered. “But you said they’ve modified your designs, right?” Sophie nodded. “So they might have removed the kill switch?”

“No,” she said flatly. “It isn’t a piece of code you can cut out, it’s an intrinsic part of the network. This isn’t procedural software. All the knowledge and intelligence in a neural net is dispersed across millions of connections, in the same way memory and thought are dispersed across the neurons and synapses of our own brains.” She saw Clark’s blank expression, switched to an analogy. “Consider your own brain. At its core, the medulla and thalamus control your most basic functions. Eating, drinking, sleeping, waking, sex. Call that the reptile mind. The cerebral cortex, where language and music and mathematics live, evolved on top of that. You can retrain and evolve my nets, and that’s what the cartels appear to have done -” this was the first I’d heard of it, and it amazed me – “but their higher capabilities are still wrapped around their reptile minds, where the kill switch lives. Even if you know it’s there, going after it would be like performing brain surgery with a hatchet. The operation might succeed, but the patient would never survive.”

“Charming image,” Clark said waspishly. “Never mind the technical details. The point is, if we can get onto their network, we could shut all their drones down.”

“Probably. Unless they know the kill switch exists, and they’ve programmed their communications hardware to filter it out before it reaches the neural net.”

“Who knows that sequence?”

“Until a few days ago, just James and me. No one else, I don’t think.” I shook my head in confirmation. I’d never considered it a great secret, but I’d never had any reason to tell anyone else. “I’ve since shown it to Dr. Elliot and some of his staff.” Clark looked blank. “The head of the DEA technical team.”

He nodded, pleased. “Nice to know we might be able to end this whole shitstorm with one fell swoop.” He switched to exhortation mode. “That’s why your visit to Convoy is so important. We need to get onto their drone network and shut it down before more people die. Whatever you two find down there might help.”

“No. Not both of us.” Sophie turned to me. “Just me, not you. Not after what just happened.”

“Forget it,” I said firmly. “I’m coming. A little Caribbean R &R sounds like just the thing for me. I mean, we’re just talking about paying Jesse and Anya a friendly visit and keeping our eyes open, right? No big deal. It’ll be fine. It might even be fun.”

I didn’t really believe that. But I wasn’t about to let her go by herself, and not just out of concern for her safety. It was past time to find out what Sophie was hiding.

“Try to stay out of trouble this time,” Lisa advised me as we departed.

I smiled. “I’ll do my best.”

Chapter 21

A government driver took us to a Holiday Inn via downtown’s Apple Store. I emailed Jesse from there while Sophie bought me a new iPhone. En route to the hotel I checked mail on it, and found his response:

Come on down. Good timing – going into Port-au-Prince tomorrow for supplies. Can supply airport pickup for small fee. Anya suggests one pound of flesh nearest heart, per passenger, plus tip. Email flight details.

“Is your phone on?” I asked, as we continued on to the hotel.

“I’ve been mostly keeping it off. Not that it would matter much. They must have someone here who harvested the DEA chief’s address. It wouldn’t be hard to find out what room we’re in and train a drone to hit that window.”

“Great.”

“Yeah. It used to be reasonable to assume that if someone wanted to kill you, they’d at least have to take some kind of personal risk. Not any more. That changes everything.” She sighed. “I’ve been working with the DEA’s technical staff for the last couple of days. Unpaid, I might add. They’re hopeless. No clue.”

We left the car, entered the Holiday Inn, made our way into the elevators. For the first time since we had left Pasadena we were alone together.

“Your poor face,” she said softly, touching it.

“I fear for my modelling career.”

We looked at each other.

“At the school, that was an ambush, you know,” I said. “They were waiting for us. I think for you.”

It was intended as an opportunity for her to open up and tell me everything.

Instead she just shrugged. “Who knows?”

The elevator dinged open. We made our way to the big and impersonally nice hotel room, where Sophie’s things lay scattered untidily. The window had a view of the Washington Monument. In a fit of paranoia I closed the curtains before turning to her. I didn’t quite know what to say.

She could tell by my expression that something was wrong. “What is it?”

I took a deep breath.”Michael Kostopoulos.”

“What about him?” She looked puzzled.

“Why was he sending you emails just before he died?”

“He – what? Kostopoulos? Sending me emails?” She sounded genuinely dumbfounded. “What are you talking about?”

“I broke into your mail,” I said harshly. “I read it. You were supposed to meet him at the Cadillac Hotel.”

After a brief pause Sophie burst out laughing.

“What the fuck?” I was well on my way to outrage. “You think this is funny?”

“Yes,” she gasped, getting hold of her mirth. “I’m sorry. But it is. That wasn’t my account. You didn’t hack into my email, you hacked into me hacking into someone else’s. You have to admit that’s pretty farcical.”

I took a moment to absorb that revelation. Sophie had never known Kostopoulos at all: she had just read an email he had sent to someone else. It took some of the wind out of my indignant sails, but it also raised a hundred more questions. “Whose email? Why did you hack into it?”

She winced, looked away. “I’m sorry. I can’t answer that.”

“What?” Her stark negation took me aback. “Why?”

“James, I’ve never told you a lie, and I’m not going to start now. But there are some things going on I can’t tell you about.”

I stared at her. “Why not?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”

After a long moment I said, “I don’t understand.”

She sat down heavily on the bed. “I’d like to tell you everything, believe me. I want that more than anything. But I just can’t.”

A thought occurred to me. “Do you think we’re being bugged?”

She shook her head.

“Then… ” I stared at her helplessly. I already knew she wouldn’t change her mind. “Do you think you’re protecting me or something? Like Peter Parker not telling Mary Jane he’s Spider-Man? Because if so, that is purest fucking bullshit.”

“I’m not exactly Spider-Woman,” she said, “but you know what, with great power comes great responsibility, that part is true.”

“What great power?” I demanded.

She didn’t answer.

“You know I wouldn’t tell anyone else if you told me not to,” I thought out loud. “So it’s something you think I’ll do if I find out. Right?”

“I can’t explain. It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not. You don’t trust me. It’s as simple as that.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

“James,” Sophie said quietly, “I love you. I trust you. And I need you to trust me too. I need you to accept that right now there are some things I just can’t tell you. Please. You’ll understand why when I can.”

“Yeah? When will that be?”

She shrugged. “Maybe weeks. Maybe months. I don’t know.”

A poisonous silence filled the room.

“You know what kept me going, in the jungle?” I asked bitterly. “You did. Thinking about seeing you again. I nearly died there. And you know why, don’t you? Or at least you know part of it. I don’t care if you promised someone else you wouldn’t say anything. You need to tell me.”

“I can’t,” she said sharply. “Do you know what it’s been like for me? Wondering if you were dead? Wondering if I would ever even find out? I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, I kept looking up at people and thinking they might be you, like they might spring you on me by surprise. It was awful. You’re my rock. My anchor. I need you. Especially now. You don’t understand how much pressure there is on me right now. But I can’t tell you why. I’m sorry, I want to, but I can’t.”

“Sure. Right. Your rock. Your anchor,” I repeated savagely. “You know what I feel like right now? Like hired help. Like your fucking mascot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry. You’re sorry.”

She shrugged as if to say what more can I do? As far as she was concerned, I could tell, this conversation was over, this situation resolved.

I shook my head, torn between fury and sudden trepidation.

Then I bit out, “What if sorry isn’t good enough?”

She hesitated. Swallowed. “What does that mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.”

We stood as tense as coiled springs, breathing hard, staring at each other.

“James,” Sophie said, in a little-girl voice unlike any I had ever heard from her before, “are you breaking up with me?”

Those words seemed to echo through the room.

I struggled for breath. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” A hollow sound almost like the beginnings of laughter emerged from her mouth. “Well. When you figure it out, maybe you could be so kind as to keep me informed.”

Seconds ticked past. I tried to hold on to my rage.

“I understand. For what it’s worth. It’s actually not a big surprise. I knew it might happen.” She took a deep breath. “And it wouldn’t actually be the end of the world, right? It just – it just feels like it.” Her mask cracked for a second, and she had to inhale deeply again before regaining her Spock-like cool. “If that’s what you want, I won’t make it hard on you. You know me. I won’t scream or weep or write you a nasty letter of reference or anything. I’m, you know, it’ll be reasonable. We’re adults, right? Maybe we can be friends.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. She didn’t look at me. After a moment she wiped tears from her cheeks with an impatient motion. I had only ever seen her cry twice before; on the night we had first met, and only a few hours ago, greeting me in Clark’s office. Witnessing her tears and knowing that I had caused them felt like being punched in the gut. I wanted to rush to her to comfort her, had to hold myself back.

“It’s easy for you.” Her voice was low and unsteady. “You can find someone else. I’m sure there are lots of girls, women, who’d love to… ” She left the sentence incomplete. “It’s different for me. You know what the chance is of finding another man who actually understands me? And likes me too?” She did laugh then, hollowly, cynically. “I think the technical term is ‘astronomical’.”

I stared at her.

“You look surprised,” she said.

“I guess I am. You never acted like I was so important to you.”

“Is that what you want? To be important?”

“You think it’s that simple?” I asked back, stung.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“It’s not just this, you know. If it was just you keeping a secret, maybe I could be OK with that. It’s not about being important. You’re smarter than me, you’re more important, fine, I can live with that. But I can’t even be trusted to open my mouth. Not during important conversations.”

“What are you talking about? I have never said anything even remotely like that.”

“Maybe not. But it’s in what you do. Just now, with Clark. All you wanted from me was to shut the hell up. “

“I never meant to -” Sophie shook her head, helpless to find the right words. “James, I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel small. You know that, right? I’m so sorry.”

“Well. I’m sorry too.”

We stared at each other. We were both trembling.

“I can do better,” she said. “I can treat you better. I will. I fucked up, and I’m sorry, and I can make that up to you. But I can’t tell you everything. I wish I could. But you don’t know what’s at stake.”

“Because you won’t tell me.”

“I want to. I so want to. I just can’t. Do you believe that much?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Because if you don’t, then there’s really no use even… ” She didn’t finish. Her whole body, and every muscle in her face, was tense.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I believe you want to tell me.”

“Good.” She exhaled with relief. “Thank you. I’m sorry. But I have to do this. I probably shouldn’t even tell you this much, but, James, the world is changing. Maybe it’s already changed. And as far as I can tell I’m the only one who can stop things from falling apart. If I fuck up -” She looked like she didn’t even want to pursue that thought to its logical conclusion, but forced herself: “If things go wrong, I think a lot of people are going to die. Not just people. Governments. Whole societies.”

I stared at her, a little rocked by her words, and by the palpable strain in her voice. Sophie wasn’t prone to hyperbole. Understatement, if anything. But at the same time, I was infuriated even further by her invocation of some mysterious threat whose existence I was supposed to just accept without explanation.

“Are you still going to come with me tomorrow?” she asked eventually, in a dull voice. “Maybe you shouldn’t. You’re still recovering. Maybe it would be best for both of us to go back to our corners and think things over.”

I considered. And wondered if there was some other reason she didn’t want me to come. “No. I’m going. Jesse’s part of this too, isn’t he? And Anya?”

She didn’t reply.

I shook my head, angry and frustrated. “I’m tired. We’ve got an early flight. Let’s try to get some sleep.”

For days I had ached to hold Sophie in my arms, but that night we slept on separate sides of the Holiday Inn’s king-size bed. Despite our exhaustion we lay motionless, both awake, both silent, for a long time, before I finally managed to find a twisting path to sleep.

Chapter 22

As we swooped down towards Toussaint International I caught a glimpse of a colossal shantytown like a human ant farm crammed onto the spit of land between airport and sea. I had never before seen anything like that vast agglomeration of corrugated tin and mud. Haiti, by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere even before it had been devastated by 2010’s terrible earthquake, was the first real Third World nation I had ever visited.

I realized as we landed that if Jesse wasn’t waiting for us, we had no fallback plan. The thought was more than a little scary. This wasn’t travel as usual, that wasn’t a European or Japanese city out there beyond the airport: Port-au-Prince was a lawless metropolis seething with desperate people ruled by a corrupt government. There had been food riots here just last month. Anything might go wrong, and we were hopelessly unprepared if it did. Too late I began to kick myself for being such an idiot. I didn’t even know the names of any hotels, and Haiti was so behind the technological times that my new iPhone might not work here even as a phone, let alone an Internet device.

We descended from the 737 onto the tarmac. The blazing sun felt heavy, and the tropical air was thick and damp. The signs were in French. Like all Canadians I had studied French in high school, but I hadn’t tried to speak it in years. Fortunately, the woman at the immigration booth stamped our passports without asking any questions, and waved us on. We walked untroubled through Customs, past a forlorn souvenir stand, through double glass doors, and outside to a little walkway protected by a waist-high concrete wall.

It felt like being expelled from civilization into jungle red in tooth and claw. On the wall’s other side a hundred men in ragged clothes shouted and gesticulated as if warning us of imminent death. The only word of the cacophony I understood was “taxi!” One man actually reached over the wall to grab one of our bags, and I had to pull it away. The airport security guards looked amused and made no attempt at intervention.

The last thing in the world I wanted was to walk into that human maelstrom. I glanced at Sophie beside me. She too looked overwhelmed.

“Maverick!” a familiar and amused voice called. “Sophie!”

I looked and relaxed. Jesse stood near the end of the walkway, tall, dark, and rakishly good-looking, wearing a Sigur Ros T-shirt, expensive sunglasses, jeans with Chinese dragons painted on them, and, as usual, a wide grin that proclaimed it’s good to be me. With him was a big black man with ragged shorts, a faded red polo shirt, and golden teeth. When we emerged the army of touts and taxi drivers tried to descend on us, but Jesse’s companion repelled them with his looming presence and glittering scowl.

“You dive into a pool full of gravel or something?” Jesse asked me.

I had forgotten that my face was still marred by healing scabs and bruises. “Long story.”

A stranger might have heard that brusque exchange in lieu of salutations and concluded that we didn’t like each other. Jesse and I had been close friends for so long that we didn’t bother with greetings or other social lubricants.

“This is Zavier,” Jesse introduced our saviour. “Come on. We want to get off the docks by noon.”

The hug Jesse gave Sophie lingered a little, and I felt irrational jealousy surge within me, like lava in a long-dormant volcano, but squelched it violently. They had dated briefly, years ago, before she and I had met. Ancient history, no longer relevant. Zavier led us to a slightly scarred Land Cruiser armed with a cattle catcher and a six-foot whip antenna, ensured that all doors were locked, and conducted us into the retina-searing madness of late-afternoon Port-au-Prince traffic.

The city was all slum. Cratered, mud-puddled streets; packs of feral dogs atop waist-high mounds of trash; skeletal remains of ancient car crashes, thick with rust; stores with hand-painted signs, set in rotting concrete buildings; high walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass; abandoned piles of rubble. It was hard to distinguish between earthquake damage and hundreds of years of grinding poverty. But it was also far more colourful than I had expected. The streets were full of buses called taptaps, dazzling murals on wheels portraying Biblical scenes, soccer stars, American flags, Nike swooshes. Many walls were covered with graffiti art, or tiled with paintings for sale, and even the poorest women wore vibrant clothes.

“It’s a dump, but you get used to it,” Jesse said cheerfully. “There’s some nice places. You go up to Petionville,” he gestured up a steep cross street, “there’s nightclubs, supermarkets, galleries, a couple of amazing French restaurants. But shit flows downhill.”

The traffic was intense but kept moving, in part because this theoretically two-lane road supported at least three lanes of vehicles. Every taptap overflowed with ragged passengers, and we passed crowds of pedestrians, many barefoot. Many turned and stared at us. I tried to interpret their expressions. Curious? Jealous? Hateful? I couldn’t tell. I had never seen such hopeless poverty. I couldn’t imagine what people who had spent their whole lives trapped in its quicksand might think of us.

“Is it dangerous?” Sophie asked.

Jesse nodded. “Can be. Petionville’s OK, but you wouldn’t catch me in Cite-Soleil at night. At least not without Zavier.” Zavier’s grin shone. “There were food riots last month, Because the government’s cracking down on the ports to look good for the DEA.” Sophie and I exchanged a quick look. “Idiots. So now it takes a month to bring any imports in. There’s rice literally rotting on the docks. Meanwhile Haiti can’t feed itself, because it doesn’t produce enough, because fucking government price controls give farmers no incentive.” He shook his head in disgust. Jesse had been a libertarian/anarchist since I had known him; he hated all governments everywhere, and everything they represented.

We reached a UN checkpoint, where blue-helmeted men with light brown skin inspected our passports and Zavier’s paperboard ID card. Shortly afterwards we entered a region of high fences and warehouses, some watched by armed security, some rusting and abandoned.

“So-called peacekeepers,” Jesse muttered. Zavier grunted with contempt at the word. “Brazilians. Only thing they’ve done for this country is ensure full employment for prostitutes.”

“You know what your problem is, Jester?” I asked. As teenagers we had watched my dad’s tape of Top Gun to death, and the code names ‘Maverick’ and ‘Jester’ for each other had stuck. I had always liked them, because they made him the sidekick and me the hero. “You have a problem with authority.”

We turned another corner and suddenly the turquoise Caribbean lay before us, beyond a jumbled and crowded industrial complex of piers, docks, cranes and shipping containers, all surrounded by chainlink fence topped with razor wire.

Jesse turned and grinned at me wolfishly. “Wrong way round. Authority has a problem with me.”

I helped carry supples – groceries, cases of Prestige beer, water containers, bits of hardware – from the back of the Land Cruiser down to the docks. My feet hurt, but not badly. The boat that was our destination was a forty-foot-long flatbed with a big motor on one end and a canopy in the middle, crewed by a middle-aged Haitian and his teenage assistant. It stank strongly of diesel.

“Where’s the Ark?” I asked.

“Out there.” Jesse waved vaguely. “We hardly ever bring her in. Too much paperwork. Easier to call these boys on the satphone. Wilfrid the water taxi, eh?” He clapped the captain on the back, and got a grin in return.

“Should we get our exit visas from the harbourmaster or something?” I asked.

“Nah. This isn’t Canada, you don’t need to go line up for the blessing of the authorities to get anything done. Nobody cares. If they pretend to, you just give them twenty bucks and they stop. Let me go pay off Zavier and we’re out of here.”

I was not particularly reassured by either his words or the sight of Captain Wilfrid opening a bottle of Prestige. Figuring when in Rome, I did the same. Sophie followed suit, and Jesse joined us on his return. As the teenage boy undid the mooring ropes, the four of us clinked our bottles together.

“Welcome to Haiti,” Jesse said, “The land of voodoo, violence, venality, and surprisingly decent beer.”

“Why here?” I asked, as we eased our way out into the sea. “Why not Jamaica or the Caymans or something?”

“It’s not that bad. No red tape. And the reefs near the south coast are prime shipwreck territory.”

Wilfrid took over the wheel from the teenager and throttled the engine forward. Its churning roar precluded conversation as the boat surged into the bay. I turned back and watched the vast and soiled conurbation of Port-au-Prince, and the steep green hills beyond, dwindle into the distance. We passed an island the size of Manhattan, then hit the open ocean, where the slow swells were bigger than the boat and the salt wind whipped at us unceasingly.

Jesse guided us by GPS. I felt increasingly uneasy as the last hint of land disappeared, and the endless ocean surrounded us. This turquoise sea was the watery graveyard for thousands of ships, that was the whole reason Jesse was here, and this particular boat didn’t seem much more seaworthy than the lake-going vessels of the summers of my Canadian youth. This was hurricane season, too; the sky was clear, but I knew all too well that in the tropics blue sky could become brutal storm in minutes.

Beside me Sophie stared at the infinite monotony of the ocean. I could tell by her abstract fascination that she was marvelling at something I wouldn’t understand.

“What is it?” I asked anyway.

“Fractal patterns,” she said softly. “In the waves and the spray. They’re amazing.”

I watched her rapt expression and wondered, not for the first time, what it must be like to see patterns and connections everywhere, to speak the mathematical language of the universe with such instinctive fluency.

Chapter 23

I had known Jesse Ruby since we were fifteen years old. I had been the smartest kid in my high school until he transferred in and claimed that title, so at first we butted heads; but a month after we met, at his instigation, he and I smuggled sulfuric acid out of the school laboratory and used it to synthesize nitroglycerine in my garage. The resulting explosion left me deaf for three days and cemented our friendship forever.

In most respects we were opposites. I was shy, introverted, and awkward, skinny and bespectacled, a classic geek who invariably blushed and turned incoherent on the rare occasions I tried to talk to a girl. Jesse had won the genetic lottery outright: in addition to his razor-sharp mind he was tall, handsome and outgoing, a swimmer and soccer player who could charm anyone and never lacked for a girlfriend. But I was the only one in town who truly spoke his language. So he dragged me to parties and soccer matches, until the edge came off my social anxiety and I learned how to talk to strangers and even girls, as long as they weren’t too pretty; and I introduced him to Stanislaw Lem, the Descartes mathematics contest, programming languages, multiplayer video games, and the more interesting nooks of the then-burgeoning Internet.

After I got my driver’s license – I was six months older – he would often stay over at my place, and late at night we would smuggle my parents’ car out of the garage, pushing it halfway down the street in neutral before we dared start to the engine, and drift aimlessly past the deserted strip malls that defined the disaffected geography of our lives, or drive through dark country roads and corn fields to neighbouring towns, steal street signs that matched the names of girls we wanted to impress, or even venture all the way to Toronto and its 24-hour diners populated by scary big-city drifters. Despite our nocturnal anomie we graduated with near-perfect marks, because we were always competing with each other. Jesse’s senior-year computer-science project, a primitive but functional first-person shooter he wrote from scratch, got the attention of the outside world and earned him a full scholarship at MIT. I had to settle for Canada’s University of Waterloo.

There I missed him. There were plenty of other geeks around, but nobody near as fun as Jesse, and I had grown used to having a friend who could open non-geek social doors for me. When we went home for the holidays we were inseparable. I drove down to Boston at least once a term in my rusting Chevy Acadian. In May after our junior year we continued down to New York, and on our first night in the Big Apple dug my old tent out of the trunk and camped in Central Park because hotels were too expensive. The next day he made friends with two waitresses who turned out to be avant-garde theatre actresses, and that night we went to a warehouse party with them. It wasn’t until the police turned up that we realized the party-throwers had broken into the warehouse illegally. Jesse somehow escaped with the actresses in the confusion that followed; I spent the night in jail, shuddering with terror. If convicted I could have been barred from the USA forever, but the charges were stayed and all records expunged. These were the years of the dot-com boom, and no judge wanted to ruin the life of a mild-mannered white geek with a bright future who had apparently just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We talked about starting a company after college, but instead Jesse decided to go to Columbia for his doctorate, which upset me more than I was willing to admit. It was then that we finally began to drift apart some, but we were still family. I wound up working for a dot-com startup in Silicon Valley. Once I answered a 3AM knock on the door of my Oakland apartment to find him there. He had given me no warning, but I just nodded, muttered “Hey,” waved towards my fold-out couch, and staggered back to bed, as if his unexpected materialization from across the country was nothing unusual. During that visit he slept with a girl named Linda Lee who I had been crushing on for months. Eventually I forgave him.

Our encounters grew increasingly sporadic. After his folks moved to Vancouver I no longer saw him over the holidays. He soon lost interest in academia and fell into the hacker scene, that loose-knit global subculture of shady young computer experts. Ultimately he dropped out of Columbia without even getting his master’s degree.

While I toiled in the Valley, Jesse worked contract software jobs in New York, Dubai and Hong Kong, backpacked through Burma, attended Burning Man, and gave talks at hacker conferences in Russia. Once he spent a week in prison in Laos and got out just in time to fly across the Pacific and attend a clothing-optional party in Malibu. After Christmas one year I went to visit him in New York, and there, at a hacker party held in and atop a Brooklyn warehouse, he introduced me to a cute blonde girl named Sophie.

In the years since she and I had grown used to Jesse disappearing for long stretches with no explanation, only to reappear with a grin, a few colourful anecdotes that said little or nothing of substance about his life, and maybe a new tattoo. Then one day he showed up with a gorgeous Russian girl in tow, a fat cheque in his hand, and a plan to use unmanned vehicles and Sophie’s neural networks to find and recover billions of dollars’ worth of ancient treasure long sunk beneath the turquoise Caribbean.

Chapter 24

It turned out that while aboard the Ark Royale, Anya Azaryeva did not wear the spike heels and microskirts that had caused so much comment after her visits to our lab. Instead she wore a bikini made of tiny fragments of fabric that were the same shade of glacier blue as her eyes. She looked like she had just stepped out of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Wilfrid’s teenage copilot seemed unable to tear his eyes away, while I had the opposite reaction: Anya made me so uncomfortable that I avoided looking directly at her. Not because of Sophie, who had never been the jealous type. The problem was that Anya was so beautiful it was actually difficult to think straight in her presence.

“Hey, darlin’,” Jesse said, kissing her perfunctorily. “Look what followed me home. I tried to say no, but they just looked so woeful.”

Sophie and I climbed onto the Ark Royale. Jesse had named it after history’s first aircraft carrier, although he had also been known to refer to it as the Royale with Cheese. I didn’t like the way its deck rolled beneath my feet. Anya said hello, gave me a surprised look that I took a moment to connect to my beat-up face, and air-kissed our cheeks as if she were French.

When I first met Anya I had thought she was shy. It had taken me some time to realize that the silent distance she kept between herself and the world stemmed instead from contempt, as if contact with ordinary people might stain her own perfection. She treated me with halting courtesy only because I was her boyfriend’s best friend. I supposed when you were that gorgeous you didn’t need to be nice. You probably didn’t need to be smart and skilled, either, but Anya, like Jesse, was living disproof of the theory that beauty times brains equals a constant.

We unloaded the nameless boat that had brought us, then waved goodbye as Wilfrid accelerated back to Port-au-Prince. I wondered if the real reason Jesse didn’t take his ship into port was that he didn’t want it to be subject to any government’s legal jurisdiction.

“Let’s head back to the happy hunting grounds,” Jesse said to Anya, who nodded and ascended to the bridge, moving with a dancer’s instinctive grace. He turned to us. “Come on. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”

The Ark Royale‘s fibreglass hull was about sixty feet long. Its back half – aft, I supposed, in nautical terminology – was roofed but open to the stern, with passageways to the external walkways on both sides, and a pool ten feet square open to the ocean beneath.

“She used to be a dive boat,” Jesse said, indicating the pool, “that’s where they’d go in when the weather was bad. Handy for us too. Those are some of your creations down below.” I squinted into the water, and in the warped light I could make out yellow cigar-shaped things about six feet long attached to steel scaffolding beneath the pool. USVs: unmanned submarine vehicles, controlled by Sophie’s Axon neural nets.

The ground floor was a living area. Twin MacBook Pros sat on a desk below nautical wall maps. Swinging doors led to the kitchen. Everything was either bolted down or kept on shelves behind netting. “There’s the head and shower,” Jesse said, indicating a door. “Try to keep it to a minimum, we’ve got solar water but not much. If it’s yellow, let it mellow. Living quarters down those stairs, your cabin is second on the left.”

We followed him up another set of metal stairs to the twenty-by-thirty-foot roof above the pool, where four UAVs sat parked, their airframes attached by bungee cables to metal rings set in the walls. They looked like cheap aluminum versions of the ones which had killed Harrison and very nearly me. Their launcher, basically a giant crossbow, stood behind them.

“Meet the Ark Royale Air Force,” Jesse said. “Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. Parked and ready for their brain surgery.”

To our right the superstructure rose another level. Through a window I could see Anya behind a wheel, computer screens, and instrumentation worthy of an airliner. On its roof, at the ship’s highest point, stood a huge whip antenna, a radar mast, and a satellite dish. Combined they looked a bit like a work of conceptual art.

“Hell of a view, ain’t it?” Jesse asked, turning to look at the sea. Westwards the sun was sinking towards the uninterrupted horizon. To the north we could see the pale vee of the ship’s wake. The surging and rocking as we encountered wave after wave was unsettling. I hoped I wouldn’t get seasick. The mainland was visible only as a bank of clouds to the east.

“It’s strange living on a boat,” he went on. “Makes you feel small and free, at the same time. Everything seems simpler. I understand Thoreau a little better now. You find yourself living dawn to dusk, like everyone must have in the days before candles.”

“You wake up at dawn?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Used to be that was just when I was finally getting home. But it’s nice. “

“So why did you need to come down here?” Anya asked us, emerging from the bridge. Her English was only slightly accented. The ship still trembled from the engine’s exertions; she must have left it on autopilot. “Why couldn’t we just download the new software like before?”

“This is a major upgrade,” Sophie said. “Swarm software. I wanted to be on hand in case there were any unexpected issues.”

“I sure hope you didn’t come for a Caribbean vacation,” Jesse said. “We’ll be putting you two to work, you know. We’ve got decks that need swabbing, dishes that need washing, planks that need walking, we have to alpha-test our entire keelhauling system, we’ve got plans for you two.”

I grinned. “Any luck finding treasure yet?”

He grimaced. “Shipwrecks, yes. Treasure, no. Our biggest haul to date was a cargo ship carrying toilets. You should see the video. Toilet bowls scattered all across the seabed. Marcel Duchamp eat your heart out.”

“Are your investors getting impatient?”

Sophie gave me a warning look. Jesse glanced at Anya, who smiled sourly. “Our investors, fortunately for us,” she said, “are long-term thinkers extraordinaire.”

Chapter 25

“Up to now your drones worked independently,” Sophie said as she typed at her laptop. A USB cable ran from it into the open guts of the aerial drone’s control system. “Now they’re going to communicate with each other, share their inputs. If one sees something interesting, they’ll all divert from their preprogrammed course to focus on it. In simulation, swarms were eight times more effective at finding sites of interest. I’m not even sure why. Maybe a swarm can see larger-scale inputs than its individual members. There might be patterns we don’t notice in the seabed topology, currents, wind, fish populations, who knows.”

“In simulation,” Anya repeated skeptically.

Sophie unplugged the drone, looked up not at Anya but at Jesse. “That’s why I’m here. I may have to retrain them. But in the end it should still work.”

When she was finished it was too late for a test run. Jesse made dinner while I checked email on my iPhone, via Wi-Fi and the satellite dish. “Enjoy the fresh veggies while they last,” he advised us as he served spaghetti and salad. “Mostly we live out of boxes and bottles and cans.”

We watched the sunset while we dined. I hoped for a green flash, I’d never seen one, but none came. “Happens maybe once every couple of weeks,” Jesse explained. “Atmospheric conditions have to be perfect.”

Sophie and I washed the dishes together in silence. As we worked I wondered what we should be looking for. So far Jesse and Anya didn’t seem to be hiding anything. I also wondered about the traumatic experience on a boat that Sophie had neglected to ever mention before.

I can’t tell you my secrets yet, she had said last night.

I didn’t really know much about her past. There hadn’t seemed to be much to know; an ordinary childhood, four years spent as her upper-class North Carolina high school’s math and computer whiz, and then Caltech. I had never even met her family, because she had none: her mother had died young in a car crash, her father of cancer only days before we had first met, and she had no siblings. That was all I knew. What else hadn’t she told me?

Ours was anything but a joined-at-the-hip relationship. Sophie sometimes went to conferences without me, and I often overnighted at our UAV test range in the desert outside of Pasadena. She could at least theoretically have maintained an entire secret life and hidden its traces. It wouldn’t have been beyond her. She wasn’t like other people.

After dinner we retired to our cabin, which was host to four berths, arranged as two sets of bunk beds set into the walls. A small mirror hung above a tiny counter. Through a porthole we could see a crimson wisp of cloud. There was barely enough room for the two of us to turn around, and I wondered how four people had ever fit.

“You know,” Sophie said thoughtfully, as I looked out at the endless expanse of the steely sea, “we’ve never had sex in a berth before.”

I knew it was intended as a kind of peace offering but it made me furious, as if she thought I was some kind of subhuman beast to be distracted with carnal pleasure.

“Just a thought,” she said quickly, reading my face.

Jesse’s voice calling from above was a welcome intrusion. “Yo, Maverick. You want to grab a beer?”

I said, “Love to.”

He and I liberated Prestiges from the fridge, climbed up to the flight deck, and watched the the gibbous moon and its glittering reflection on the Caribbean.

“So did you discover the subtle allure of scarification, or get into a slapfight with Edward Scissorhands, or what?” he asked.

“Some of it’s shrapnel from a mortar attack,” I said with studied casualness, “some from being chased through the Colombian jungle by narco-terror paramilitaries.”

“Right.”

I didn’t say anything. It felt good to be able to one-up Jesse in tales of international adventure for once. I was suddenly proud, almost glad, of the harrowing days I had barely survived.

“Wait,” he said, “you’re not serious, are you?”

“Serious as a heart attack. As an AK-47.”

He half-smiled, still not sure if I was bullshitting, and we fell into our own arch and stylized private dialect. “Really. But not too serious, I presume. I mean, not as serious as a Cure song.”

“Au contraire. At least that serious. I would venture to say, Mr. Ruby, that I am as serious as Mr. Spock.”

“You don’t say.”

“I just did.”

“I must admit, Mr. Kowalski, you do sound very serious indeed. Almost as serious as Scotland Yard’s Serious and Organized Crime Squad.”

I tried to think of a simile to top that, and failed. “Yes. As serious as that. But not as organized.”

“No. Clearly.” He hesitated, then gave in. “So what the fuck?”

I told him the short version. I really wanted to tell him everything, including that we had been sent to investigate him. He was my oldest friend, and there in his presence the notion of Jesse being in bed with drug dealers seemed about as likely as him secretly being a space alien. It felt like utter betrayal not to tell him that he and his girlfriend were suspects. But I was much less sure of Anya’s innocence, and this didn’t seem like the time to ask Jesse to choose between loyalties, so I omitted the aspersions that had been cast on the two of them.

While I spoke I kept a sharp eye on his reaction. It was hard to measure, even though I’d known him for almost twenty years. He expostulated regularly, with genuine amazement, but I could also tell that he was listening to my tale as something relevant to his life, was drawing mental connections between it and things he already knew.

“Whoa,” he said when I was done. “Dude. Holy shit. That’s crazy. Hardcore, man.” He shook his head, astounded. “Fucking hardcore.”

I basked in his awe. “Yeah.”

“Well. I hope you don’t find our hospitality insanely boring by comparison.”

“I kind of hope I do. I could use some boring right now.”

“I bet. So.” He paused. “Other than your recent harrowing near-death experiences, how’s things?”

I knew he meant Sophie; he had noticed the tension between us. “Pretty good, I guess. I don’t know. Ask me in another couple weeks, actually. I just got a pretty hefty dose of perspective out of what happened, and I’m… sort of rethinking a lot of things. Mostly in a good way,” I added hastily. “How about you?”

“Oh, you know. Blissfully perspective-free.”

I chuckled.

“No, I lie, getting away from clubs and parties and all that shit has actually been really good. Living on a boat makes you feel pretty small. Especially during storms. Not like getting chased through jungle by guys with guns, but still, kind of makes you think about what matters.” He smiled ruefully. “Shit, it’s like we’re growing up or something.”

“Perish the thought, Mr. Ruby, perish the thought.”

But he was right. This was already one of the the most meaningful discussions Jesse and I had ever had. Usually our conversations consisted of in-jokes, tech-talk, goofy spirals of increasingly implausible speculation, and sardonic discussion of books, movies, video games, ideas and events. We never talked about feelings.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The other point of view is that I ran away from the real world to live on a boat in the Caribbean with awesome bleeding-edge technology and the world’s hottest girlfriend. How cool is that?”

I grinned. “Yeah.”

“How’s Sophie doing?” he tried again.

“She’s fine,” I said shortly. “How about Anya?”

He nodded, accepting my evasion. “Good. She’s good. She’s really sweet.”

I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows.

“Anya can be kind of standoffish at first,” he admitted. “Artifact of her upbringing. She had kind of a weird adolescence, she’s used to everybody wanting something from her all the time. But under that, once she drops her shields, she’s a lot different than she might seem.”

“Would it be wrong of me to say ‘good’?”

He laughed. “No.”

A silence fell. We emptied our beers.

“Well. I’m beat.” I had been awake for only twelve hours, but it was true. My body was still recuperating from Colombia. “See you in the morning?”

“Bright and early.”

Back in our cabin, the lights were already out, and Sophie lay curled in a berth, but I could tell from her breath that she was asleep. I selected a different berth, undressed, slipped under the covers and closed my eyes. Neither of us spoke.

I wanted to wallow in self-pity. My girlfriend had been keeping terrible secrets from me, maybe for years, because she didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth. I was the wronged one here, the wounded party, the victim.

But as good as it felt to be a martyr, it was shallow and childish. Whatever she was keeping from me seemed more like a terrible burden than a juicy secret. She had apologized for how she sometimes acted. She was going to try to do better. And I was the one who had jumped wrongly to the conclusion that she was cheating. We both deserved better. I owed it to her, to us, to give her another chance. At least until I found out what she was hiding.

“Sophie?” I said into the darkness.

For a second I thought she would feign sleep. Then she said, voice taut, “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

She hadn’t expected that. “About what?”

“I don’t know. Everything. Being a jerk.”

“You’re not being a jerk. It’s… I’m sorry too.”

“It’s OK,” I said, and meant it.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“If you want to.” But I didn’t. I was exhausted. “Maybe tomorrow? Or when we get back? I mean, the important thing is just, I’m sorry.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

A long moment passed.

“Can I come over?” she asked, in that little girl’s voice.

“Of course.”

She padded over, slipped under my covers and on top of me. The berth wasn’t really designed for two, but I didn’t care. It was so good to feel her naked body against mine again, to hear her purr like a cat as we held each other.

Her hands slipped down my body as her lips found mine. For a moment I hesitated. Then I kissed back, and pressed myself against her. The space was so tiny that we first had to roll onto our sides before I could go on top. Sophie alternated between giggles and gasps as we moved against each other to find a position that worked, it was like being teenagers in a car.

The sex that followed was raw, animal and violent, totally unlike us. She raked my back with her fingernails while I pulled at twisted fistfuls of her hair and she made guttural animal noises, heedless of her head thumping against the wall, I had to cup one hand around it to protect it. Afterwards we lay naked and sweat-soaked in one another’s arms, both a little stunned by the primal carnality that had just possessed us, lost together in a bewildered and blissful exhaustion.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yeah.”

I felt closer to her than I had for weeks, maybe months; felt like I had something unspeakably precious in my arms, something close to divine that had to be protected against all the slings and poisonous arrows of the world.

“Do you think they heard us?” she asked.

“I think they heard us in Miami.”

She chuckled. We held each other in silence for some time.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she murmured into my ear. “You remember when we first met, right after my dad died, I told you I was trying to reinvent myself?” I nodded. “You know the real reason I wanted to? Because I was lonely. I was so fucking lonely. I used to look at all the stupid people, going to parties, laughing with their friends, and sometimes I wanted to be stupid like them so much. But the more people I met, the lonelier I got. With one exception. The only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t make me feel lonely is you. I don’t even know why. Maybe you do.”

I didn’t answer.

“So you better not break up with me.” At that she started to laugh, in a cracked voice. “Or I’ll be a very angry and dangerous jilted girlfriend and I’ll build a kamikaze drone to find you and blow you up.”

I couldn’t help but begin to chuckle too. “Note to self,” I mock-declaimed. “Don’t dump her. Kill her. Much safer.”

“Note to self. Build drone that automatically kills James if I die.”

“Note to self. Kill her before she builds that drone.”

“Note to self,” she barely managed to get the words out, “build that drone tomorrow.”

“Note to self. Kill! Kill! Kill!”

Our laughter crescendoed into something close to hysteria. When it ended we lay lazily against one another, all tension gone from our bodies, and luxuriated in each other’s smell and the feel of our bodies moving and breathing together. Sophie closed her eyes and I watched her for some time, feeling tenderly protective.

“I love you,” she whispered. “Sweet dreams.”

“Sweet dreams. I love you too.”

Chapter 26

I was woken by the slight shudder of the engine stopping. Pale dawn light streamed in through the porthole. For a bleary second I didn’t know where we were or what was happening. Then I remembered, and understood; we had reached our target destination, near some reefs off of Haiti’s southern shore.

Jesse’s voice echoed down the stairs: “All right, let’s go-go Power Rangers! Coffee’s ready. Let’s see what these bad boys of yours can do.”

Mugs in hand, we followed him up to the flight deck, and watched Jesse and Anya set a drone on the launcher. They had already dispatched the USVs: the trails of their dozen wakes were clearly visible as they swam out through a sea as flat as mirrored glass. Soon they would dive to the seabed and follow its contours, searching with their cameras and metal detectors, and occasionally surfacing to communicate with the active UAV. It in turn would relay their findings, and its birds-eye view, to the Ark Royale. When the USVs ran out of juice, they bobbed up to the surface, where their solar panels feasted on the tropical sun. In that way they could theoretically operate continuously for weeks, with a new oversight UAV sent up every six hours.

Jesse started up the drone’s propeller, then launched it. The launcher was basically a hand-cranked giant rubber band that made an amusing whang! sound as it catapulted the aircraft into the sky.

“We better keep the test run short,” Jesse said, after launching the third UAV. “Some weather on the way in couple hours. They said maybe a tropical storm. But don’t worry, this tub’s tougher than she looks.”

After we breakfasted on fried eggs and plantains, I stayed and watched the UAV data on Anya’s laptop while Sophie changed into her swimsuit and Jesse washed up. The drones had already gone off their suggested course, following the electronic equivalent of a hunch. I knew their neural networks weren’t even a thousandth the size of a human brain, but it was still slightly eerie to see them doing their own thing.

“How do they look?” Anya asked from behind me.

I twitched; she had crept up as silently as a cat. “They’ve either gone rogue or they’re on to something.”

She pulled up a chair and sat crosslegged, watching the screen. “What do we do if they’ve gone rogue?”

“I was kidding. I’m sure they’re fine.”

“But if they did, what would you do?”

“Hope that you had good insurance?” I joked.

I glanced over at the frown on Anya’s perfect face, and then quickly away, acutely aware that her hand on her armrest was only inches away from my arm, and that the bikini atop the taut curves of her flawless body made her look more naked than naked. She was such a walking male fantasy that just being near her caused my mating drive to kick into a combination of fifth gear and panic mode, as all the neon lights and bells and fireworks of my animal brain went off at once. It was like all other women ever were flawed experimental chaff on the road to creating Anya Azaryeva. Except that I didn’t actually like her much. Jesse’s claim that she was really sweet was hard to believe with the proverbial cold light of morning illuminating her even colder expression.

“So how did you guys meet?” I asked, on the grounds that if she was talking I didn’t have to. “Jesse’s never told me the story.”

“In New York City.” Even her faint accent made me dizzy. “A hacker convention called Hope.”

“Really? What year? I went to Hope once.”

“Three years ago. The last Hope.” I shook my head. “I went with a gay friend of mine, he pretended to be straight and I pretended to be his girlfriend. I had to do things like that when I was single. Or spend all my time fending off men.”

I wondered what it was like to be so ultimately desirable, to know that everyone who saw you wanted to either be you or be with you. She spoke like it was ultimately a burden. I had my doubts. I wondered why someone so beautiful that she could get pretty much anything she wanted, just by asking, had bothered to master network engineering, an extremely antisocial field. But maybe that was exactly why she had bothered. To be judged and glorified for ability instead of appearance, for once.

“But at Hope Jesse and I met. And. Well. What is the expression? There were sparks.” A girlish, mischievous smile that made her look like an entirely different woman briefly lit up her face. I wondered if that was a glimpse of the Anya that Jesse knew. “So afterwards I found him online. I didn’t tell him I was the girl he’d met at Hope. I was just a name on the screen. We became friends. Then intimate. We wrote each other long emails every day, had IM conversations for hours. I wouldn’t tell him what I looked like. He must have thought me ugly as sin. I made him think I was poor, too. But it didn’t matter. We shared our souls before we met in the flesh.”

I nodded slowly. Relationships that blossomed online, “text before sex,” were not uncommon among my peer group, but I was surprised to hear it of Jesse. He had never been one to spend more time than necessary socializing online. He didn’t even have a Facebook account.

“All right,” Sophie said. She had changed into her black one-piece swimsuit. “Where’s this ocean you keep talking about?”

Anya smiled and stood. “I better show you. It’s very hard to find.”

They descended towards the deck. I couldn’t help but notice that Sophie looked dowdy and thick-hipped and unattractive next to Anya’s incandescent beauty. A big blue dragonfly buzzed around as Jesse came over to shoulder-surf.

“She was telling me how you met,” I said. “Faceless, anonymous soul-bonding across the Internet. Lucky for you. You’d never have gotten anywhere in person.”

He grinned. “That’s her version.”

“Oh?”

“The truth, which is double-plus-eyes-only-top-secret, don’t tell her or I will keelhaul you for real, is when she contacted me anonymously, I was paranoid someone was after me, so I hacked back to her computer, took over her webcam, and went ‘hello, baby, you can cyberstalk me any time!’”

“Oh.”

“But seriously, breathe a word of that to no one. Not even Sophie. I mean, not asking you to lie to your girlfriend, but if she doesn’t ask, don’t tell. It’s a big deal to Anya that I didn’t know what she looked like. She’d kill me. Not even sure that’s hyperbole.”

“Gotcha,” I agreed.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a visual discontinuity on the laptop, and turned to look. It was set to automatically rotate between drone data on one map and the ship’s radar on the other. At first I thought the black blotch on the radar screen was a returning UAV. Then I realized it was much too big.

“Hey,” I said. “We’ve got company.”

“No kidding? Must be a fishing boat. They don’t usually come this far out.”

The blotch vanished, then re-appeared closer to us. Again, and again. It looked like it was coming straight for us, and fast.

“Huh. Weird,” Jesse said. “Hey, you know what? I’ve got an actual telescope. Want to go play Captain Jack Sparrow?”

We climbed up atop the bridge. Below us Anya carved laps around the boat with a competitive-level front crawl, while Sophie floated on her back. Jesse extended the wood-and-brass telescope, squinted through it, panned it across the horizon, stopped. His curious expression morphed into a frown.

“Who is it?” I asked.

Instead of answering he passed over the telescope. It took me a little while to local the oncoming vessel. It was like Wilfrid’s water taxi, but newer and cleaner, with a big radio antenna and two powerful engines. There were four men on board, all young and strong, in khaki pants and black T-shirts. They looked Hispanic, not Haitian.

“No one you know?” I asked, handing it back.

Jesse shook his head.

“Maybe the Dominican Republic coast guard?”

“We’re a long way from the DR. And they’ve got no flag.”

I turned and squinted at the horizon, and made out a faint dot. I almost imagined I could hear those dual engines. There was no way we could outrun them.

I tried to make a joke out of it. “There aren’t any real pirates of the Caribbean nowadays, right?”

“No. I’m sure it’s no big deal.” But he did not sound at all sure. “Let’s get the girls out of the water. Whoever they are, I’m guessing they -“

He didn’t finish the sentence; instead he froze with the telescope against his eye.

“What?”

After a long moment Jesse lowered the telescope. “Whoever they are,” he said grimly, “they’ve got guns.”

Chapter 27

Jesse and Anya waited on the deck while Sophie and I lurked in the common area, watching through the open doors. Sophie held the satellite phone in her hand, finger poised over the DIAL button. In case there was some kind of problem. We hadn’t articulated the bad-case scenarios in any more detail than that.

“Ahoy there! What’s going on?” Jesse cried out as their boat approached.

Instead of answering they zoomed right up beside us. They had guns slung over their shoulders, big scary assault rifles that looked like M-16s from Vietnam movies. Three of them leaped onto our deck while their boat was still moving.

Jesse shouted, “Hey!” angrily, and took an aggressive step towards them, as if trying to drive off unwanted dogs.

The nearest one kicked him in the crotch with a lethally quick motion. Jesse doubled over. The other two attackers raced into the common room. Clumsy with fear and shock, I tried to interpose myself between them and Sophie as she pushed the green button, but it was already too late. We should have waited on the bridge, behind the only door on board with a lock, instead of in the common room. We should have called the moment we saw the guns. I guess we didn’t because being attacked by armed men on the high seas just didn’t seem like something that actually happened to people like us.

The lead invader smashed the butt of his gun into my face. When you imagine those kinds of things happening, you imagine being able to see what’s going on and react, but the first I knew of his action was when the gunbutt collided with my cheekbone. The impact reverberated through my whole body. I staggered back two steps, fell down hard, and lost some time. The next thing I knew Sophie was on her stomach on the ground beside me, squealing in pain as the man who had thrown her to the floor folded her arms behind her back and knelt on them. The other man, the one with a moustache who had hit me, used the butt of his gun to smash our satellite phone to smithereens.

I reached out without thinking and grabbed the guy holding down Sophie, tried to pull him off, but I had no leverage, my senses were reeling, and my muscles seemed unable to exert any significant force.

Then a strong hand grabbed me by the hair and Sophie and I were dragged outside. I didn’t resist. It was all I could do not to fall over. Time seemed to be fragmenting, splintering. We were shoved to the very aft of the boat, just above the engine. Jesse and Anya were already there. Anya seemed unhurt, but Jesse stood hunched with both hands cupped over his wounded crotch, sporting an incipient black eye.

I turned around, still dazed. One of them stood about ten feet away, at the edge of the dive pool, aiming his rifle at us. Behind him two more were searching the Ark Royale. I couldn’t believe the world had turned upside down so quickly.

Their pilot finished roping their boat to ours, and climbed on with an odd, straight-legged gait, like he had some kind of hip injury. He and the gunman exchanged a few phrases in Spanish, while both ogled Anya in her bikini. She was shivering despite the heat. I too felt cold, like my spine had turned to ice, and weak. The prospect of more violence, and probably rape and mass murder, seemed inescapable.

Unless – the two men facing us had the dive pool behind them. If their guns were safetied, maybe we could rush them, knock them into that water, steal their boat. It was a desperate chance: but after what had just happened, that kind of all-out attack before the situation settled in, before it was too late to do anything at all, seemed like our only hope.

It was one thing to know that intellectually and quite another to actually charge a man with a gun, but I felt ready to do it. It helped that I was still dazed and unable to think clearly. I glanced over at Jesse. He looked back. I prayed we were thinking the same thing, and crouched, ready to charge.

I counted down in my head: Three. Two.

They must have noticed something. The gunman raised his weapon slightly and pulled the trigger, aiming close above our heads. I felt the bullets tear through the air. The flashes of automatic gunfire seemed crazy-bright, like lightning strikes, and the earsplitting fusillade nearly deafened me.

He lowered the gun and grinned at us over it. His teeth were rotten and uneven. I stared down the black hole of the gunbarrel as the air around it warped from its heat. This man who had never seen the inside of a dentist’s office was just a finger-twitch away from killing us all, and I didn’t doubt he would do it if we charged. I felt paralyzed, didn’t know what to do. There was nothing we could do. We were helpless. There was no escape, and no hope but that of mercy.

Chapter 28

They didn’t kill us. They didn’t even harm us further. They just half-pulled and half-shoved us down into the cabin Sophie and I shared. One kept us against a wall while another searched our bags and took our ID and money. Then they closed the door on us. It had no lock and opened inward, but they had brought a loop of thick wire along, and I suspected the the scratching noises that followed were them wiring it shut.

I inspected my new wound in the mirror. A huge, already-purpling bruise on my cheek surrounded a fingernail-sized flap of skin torn open by the gunbutt. I began to gingerly clean off the blood.

Anya broke the silence: “They are going to wish on their mothers’ souls they never did this.”

I looked at her with surprise. Anger and vengeance had not even crossed my mind as a possible response to what had just happened. “Do you know who they are?”

“No. But I promise you, I will find out.”

Unless they kill us all first, I didn’t say.

“This isn’t a random attack,” Sophie said. “They came for us specifically.”

“How do you know?” Jesse asked.

“I can get by in Spanish. They were talking about her.” She nodded at Anya. “Something like she was every bit the honey they’d been told.”

Anya’s mouth twisted. “Next time you see them, tell them this honey is poison.”

“Us specifically.” Jesse sounded genuinely bewildered. “Who would do that?”

I snorted with disbelief. “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe the Colombian drug gangs you’ve been working for? Just a wild guess here. Going way out on a limb.”

Anya and Jesse gaped at me.

“What are you talking about?” Jesse demanded.

I was furious. “The whole reason we’re here is because the DEA asked us to come spy on you, because they think you’re funded by, here’s a nice phrase for you, ‘narco-terrorists.’ Who just happen to be using Sophie’s software to fly drone bombs into DEA agents and Colombian police chiefs.”

Anya stared at me like I was speaking a language she did not understand.

Jesse turned to Sophie. “You can’t believe this.”

I half-expected her to reveal everything. Surely we were beyond secrets now.

“I was skeptical,” she said, “but first we discover weaponized drones nearly identical to yours, and then we come visit you, and a bunch of Hispanic thugs attack us offshore of Haiti. Kind of an extreme coincidence, don’t you think?”

Anya shook her head. “This is madness. We don’t work for any drug gang.”

“Then where do you get your money from?” I demanded.

“My uncle.”

I gave her the most disbelieving look I could muster.

“Enough,” Sophie said sharply. “We’re here now. No sense fighting about why. We have to start doing something about it.”

“Like what?” Jesse asked.

She turned to me. “Do you have your phone?”

“My phone?” I patted my pocket. “Yes. But – holy shit. The wi-fi. We can send an email.”

I tore my iPhone out of my pocket. Its battery was dangerously low, but all I needed was sixty seconds. I launched its browser, aimed it at Gmail… and read:

WebKit can’t open the page because it can’t find the server.

“They must have shut down the dish,” I said, dejected. Nobody actually said, Maybe while we were arguing, but we were all thinking it. “We’re cut off.”

The Ark Royale shivered as its engines came to life, and began to move. Jesse looked out the porthole as the ship adopted a course.

“Due south,” he muttered.

“What’s that way?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. Colombia.”

The words did not exactly strike hope into our hearts.

“Not like I didn’t enjoy my last visit,” I muttered, “but I really hadn’t planned on going back so soon.”

We sat in grim silence for some time. The adrenalin drained from my veins, was replaced by the poison of terror and despair. I felt physically sick. Every time I thought I heard a noise outside the cabin I twitched with fright that it might be them come to hurt or rape or kill. The grinding fear of captivity was even worse than being on the run in the jungle. I tried to think about something else, anything else, but my mind was caught in the gravity well of nauseating dread. All I could think of was what they might do to us.

I looked to Sophie to offer her some kind of strength and comfort, or maybe to find some in her, but she didn’t notice; she wore a distant expression, lost in thought. I envied her. Anya smiled at me weakly when I looked at her; her rage too had been replaced by trepidation. I made myself smile back. I was glad I wasn’t alone. This was bad enough with others around.

Sophie said, “Wait a minute.”

I had heard that thoughtful note in her voice before. It meant she had just been visited by an insight. She picked up my phone, and launched its browser again.

“What?” I asked.

“The local network still works. The UAV server.”

“What about it?” Anya asked.

“There’s an HTTP interface. We use it for remote testing.”

“What?” Anya sounded shocked. “That’s an enormous security hole!”

“We never realized security was such an issue,” Sophie said archly. “The point is, we can use it to access the drones.” She tapped at the phone’s on-screen keyboard, made a satisfied noise. “Look. Here’s the camera view from the UAV parked up top.”

We all leaned forward to examine the image. It was crude black-and-white, low resolution and high-compression, but we could recognize the aft of the Ark Royale as seen through the nose camera of the one aerial drone still sitting on the flight deck.

“Their boat’s gone,” I said.

“I see it,” Jesse reported from the porthole. “It’s leaving.” He squinted. “Just one guy on it, I think.”

“Leaving three. With guns. And us locked in here. On a boat captured by fucking drug pirates. Heading for Colombia.” I shook my head with disbelief at my own recap of the situation.

“Now I know how low-tech felt,” Sophie mused, a strange expression on her face. I didn’t understand the sentence at all, but Jesse turned and looked at her as if she had said something illuminating. She took a breath and came back to us. “OK. I think our first objective is to stop the boat.”

“Sure,” Anya said sarcastically. “And the first objective of mice is to bell the cat.”

Sophie smiled sweetly at the Russian woman. “How unfortunate for the poor mice that unlike us they don’t have their own personal air force and navy. Three active UAVs and twelve USVs, to be exact, at our beck and call.”

Chapter 29

It was so much like watching her play a video game that it was hard to believe the image on my iPhone was very real. When Sophie pressed its touch-sensitive screen, the resulting signal was conveyed via the Ark Royale‘s radio antenna to the winged UAV, which in turn transmitted its nose-camera output back to my phone: a low-res image, flickering with jitter and lag, of the white blotch of the Ark Royale growing larger as the UAV dove towards the ship. Sophie steered the drone by touching the edges of the screen around that picture. I had written that code, and was proud of it.

The phone emitted a low-battery bleep, and I winced.

“Get your charger,” Sophie said, without taking her eyes from the screen.

Jesse said, “There’s no plug in here.”

The phone had no more than five minutes of power left. Probably much less, given that its screen, radio, and CPU were all running at or near capacity right now. We would be cut off after this UAV kamikaze mission, if not during. Unless -

“Wait.” I leapt from my berth and scrabbled through my baggage. “I brought a hand charger.”

I had added it to the pile atop our bed in Pasadena, what felt like a lifetime ago, in case it might come in handy in Colombia. Handy wasn’t the word: it might be a lifesaver. I plugged it into the phone gently, trying not to disturb Sophie’s control, unfolded its crank, and began to rotate it as fast as I could, transforming my own muscle power into electrical charge.

“Shit!” Sophie tapped rapidly at one corner of the screen. “I can’t do it. Sorry. There’s too much lag. I can’t aim it accurately.”

We waited for a moment as she banked the UAV in a wide circle.

Her mouth thinned. “I’ll get it. I’ll go around and do it again.”

I said, “Let me do it.”

Sophie shook her head almost automatically.

“Let me do it,” I repeated. “Who wrote the interface? Who runs the tests in the lab? Who plays a lot of video games?”

She gave me a startled look. Then a slow smile began to spread over her face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Who knew it would be a survival skill? Give me that thing. I’ve spent twenty-five years building up hand-eye coordination for exactly this moment.”

I passed the hand charger to Jesse, who took to it with such enthusiasm that I feared for its structural integrity, before I took over. I’d done this before, for our wind-tunnel and field tests, but this UAV steered like a cow, and getting the feel of its controls took some practice. But not too much. In a way I really had been practicing ever since my first game of River Raid at age eight.

About ten seconds before impact the camera got close enough for us to make out the gunmen who had seized us, staring up at their unexpected aerial visitor. I was tempted to try to kamikaze right into one of them, but the impact probably wouldn’t be lethal, or even serious; drones were very light aircraft, and ours didn’t have the benefit of high explosive. Instead I aimed the UAV at the waterline where the propellers churned. During the last five seconds I could hear its engine’s faint buzz, filtered through the cabin porthole.

The screen went blank. The Ark Royale didn’t even shudder. For a few seconds I feared the sacrifice dive had been useless.

Then a faint but grinding vibration began to keen through the vessel’s hull; the sound of a troubled motor. Fragments of the crashed drone had gotten caught up in the ship’s propellor. The noise grew louder, and more sickly, and the whole ship began to tremble. We heard shouts in Spanish. Then the engine shut off.

“Okay,” I said, losing my laserlike video-game focus at last, suddenly aware that I was sweating heavily, my hands were trembling, and my head ached. “Now what’s the second objective?”

Chapter 30

After the USVs arrived we used the tools in my electronics kit to mostly remove the hinges from the cabin door. It wasn’t easy, partly because they weren’t exactly designed for the task – although the wire stripper was surprisingly effective – and partly because we didn’t know if a gunman waited outside. Two of us worked as silently as possible while the others tried to cover their tracks with conversation.

“We’ve got two handguns on board,” Jesse told me. I hoped our captors, if they were listening, couldn’t speak English. “In a secure compartment on the bridge.”

I said, “Somehow I don’t think a firefight is going to work to our advantage.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t get them. But in case we need them.”

“If we need them, we’re already fucked.”

Anya looked at me as if that was cowardice rather than simple truth, then returned to working on the lower hinge. The other was already unbolted and loose enough to pull free of its bracket. I glanced at my iPhone’s screen. The camera on the UAV parked up top showed two men on the aft deck, one looking down at the propellors, one talking on a satellite phone.

“So you have no idea where the killer Colombian drones came from,” I said to Jesse.

“How would we know anything about that?”

“Why does the DEA think you do?”

“We didn’t give anything to a drug cartel.” He hesitated for a second. “At least not directly. I can’t believe you thought that for even a second. I mean, come on, man.”

“Not directly,” I pounced. “Meaning what exactly?”

“We have been sharing the tech with a… kind of grassroots NGO,” he admitted. “Sort of like Amnesty International, or Transparency International, but more active. Somebody there might have -” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Not might. Did,” I corrected him, almost enjoying this; it wasn’t often I got the opportunity to rake Jesse over conversational coals. “Who are these selfless altruists?”

“Called Grassfire.”

“Never heard of them.” But Sophie had twitched at the sound of that name.

“You’re not supposed to. They’re not an NGO in the traditional sense. More of an open source insurgency.”

“Insurgency. Sure sounds nonviolent.”

“It’s not like it sounds. I’ll explain later.” Jesse sounded testy.

Anya grunted with triumph as the lower bolt came loose. We only had to lift the door up off its hinges to open it. Unfortunately, we had no idea what was outside, except that there were three violent and heavily armed men somewhere on board, who had probably already reported their predicament to whoever had sent them, and we were probably fifteen miles from land on a ship whose engine no longer functioned. I had little faith in Jesse’s ability to able to explain anything later. The odds still seemed heavily in favour of there being no later for us at all.

“We have to move fast. We’ll have two minutes at most.” Sophie passed me my phone. “Are you sure you can do this?”

“No, I’m not sure. But I think so.”

Anya and Jesse looked deeply dubious.

“OK,” Sophie took a deep breath. “First we knock on their door.”

She pushed a button on my phone, thus issuing commands to the USVs now clustered around the ship. I waited and listened as ten of the twelve submersibles began to bump repeatedly into the hull. I had hoped for something unnerving and intense, but all I heard was a faint tapping.

I checked the view from the drone up top. Still two men on the aft deck, meaning one gunman unaccounted for, very possibly right outside our door. At least the men I could see were up on their feet, with anxious body language.

“Now we break it down,” Sophie said, and looked at me.

Guiding the second UAV was easier, partly because the target was bigger. I simply divebombed it straight for the Ark Royale. It didn’t really matter where it hit, but I aimed it right at the men on the aft deck, hoping to scare them, and caught a gratifying glimpse of them fleeing into the common room fast enough that we heard their pounding footsteps as the pale blob of the ship expanded rapidly to swallow up the UAV’s camera. Then the camera view went dark.

I switched back to the view from the drone above and squinted at the screen. This was the important part. Wreckage from my controlled crash lay scattered all over the aft deck. As we watched, the gunmen went out to investigate, impelled, I hoped, by inescapable human curiosity, although their body language was more like scared and bewildered. One figure appeared, then another… and then the third.

“Now,” Sophie commanded.

The cabin door was unwieldy but we managed to lift it off its hinges and open it. Anya and Sophie darted outside. Jesse and I followed. The three of them fought to replace the door on its hinges as I began to guide the third and final UAV down towards the Ark Royale, piloting it remotely as I followed the others out and along the narrow external passageway alongside the ship, towards the bow. The whole point of this third sortie was to hold their attention, so I brought it in shallowly from behind the ship, at a moderate altitude, hopefully visible and audible the whole time.

It wasn’t easy to simultaneously steer the UAV, which required both hands, and walk along the narrow passageway above the ship’s edge while the deck heaved and surged beneath me, all as quickly and surreptitiously as possible, while suffering from a piercing headache. Somehow I managed, probably because my mind was so focused on the iPhone’s screen that it didn’t interfere with my body’s instincts. My problem with tricky physical feats had always been that I thought about them too much.

The gunshots began just as I reached the the flat deck at the bow of the ship. I started, nearly pitched forward over the railing and into the ocean, but Anya grabbed my bicep and pulled me to safety. I held tightly to my phone as I spun around to see – nothing. We remained undiscovered. The gunmen were shooting at the drone arrowing towards them.

Their anti-aircraft fire swallowed up the loud whoosh of the inflatable life raft’s expansion. I made one last UAV course adjustment while Jesse and Sophie hurled the raft over the side of the boat and jumped after it. It landed open-side-up almost directly beneath me. I tossed the phone into it before leaping into the sea. The water was warm, but my sudden immersion was still a physical shock. Anya followed.

They must have heard the splashes. By the time I made it into the raft Sophie was already busy on the iPhone, and Jesse had already connected the rope to the D-ring at the back of the waiting USV, the plan was working at top speed – but it wasn’t enough. The submersible vehicle launched forward, towing us behind it, but it was too slow. We weren’t more than a hundred feet away when I looked back and saw the three Hispanic men armed with assault rifles, standing behind the bow railing.

Sophie groaned aloud, as if she had been cheated.

“Game over,” I muttered, hardly hearing myself. We had come so close, but it hadn’t been enough. I realized with horror that now we couldn’t stop if we wanted to, it would take too long to detach the raft from the USV. We had left them with no option but to shoot us, and they would almost certainly wound or kill some or all of us before they sank the raft.

One of them levelled his weapon at us.

I closed my eyes. I felt like I was already drowning.

Nothing happened.

When I looked up I saw the three of them gesticulating violently. Whoever didn’t want to shoot us won the argument. Instead they climbed to the bridge, where they tried to restart the Ark Royale. Black smoke immediately began to rise from its engine, which ground to a loud and painful halt. Meanwhile we moved away unharmed. Soon we were out of rifle range; and then, slowly, the white dot that was the Ark Royale vanished on that line where blue ocean met cloudy sky.

The life raft had an onboard survival kit with fresh water, a solar still, some tasteless but allegedly nutritious crackers, sunscreen, a first-aid kit, rope, signal flares, paddles, life jackets, and a transmitter that would broadcast a distress signal to the world. We decided not to use that last just yet: no sense painting a bullseye on ourselves when our hunters had doubtless already called in assistance. There was a brief dispute over the water, but eventually the carry-it-in-you crowd, which consisted of me and Sophie, won out over the ration-it faction by the simple expedient of drinking our share and ignoring Jesse and Anya’s protests. It was stale but the sweetest I had ever tasted. Captivity and escape were thirsty work.

We were being towed due north, towards Haiti, but we were still far from land when the air began to grow damp and smell faintly of ozone. Shadowy cloud-patterns like bruises swirled in with amazing speed from the horizon. Gusts whipped across the water as a darkness almost like night fell. In all the excitement I had forgotten about Jesse’s warning of an oncoming tropical storm.

I wanted to shout out a protest to the universe. This wasn’t fair. Our escape had seemed a triumph, if a nigh-inexplicable one; but it had left us out in open ocean, on a flimsy raft, and there was a storm coming, a big one, a bad one.

It was Anya who said what we were all thinking: “Maybe we should have stayed on board.”

She sounded bitterly amused by this joke that might well kill us all.

Chapter 31

If we hadn’t donned life jackets and roped ourselves to the raft we wouldn’t have survived. The storm tossed us around like a twig, and once, memorably, like a Frisbee. I lost count of how many times the raft flipped over like a pancake. Upside down was actually better; the sea was warmer than the rain, and we could keep our heads in the air pocket beneath, mostly protected from the elements, other than the Caribbean surging up and down some ten metres every few seconds, which was dizzyingly unpleasant but still much better than facing the onslaught full-on. There were periods when the rain hit so hard it left bruises on Sophie’s sensitive skin.

We had no idea how long the storm lasted; while we were in it, time seemed unstuck. My only clear memory of the ordeal was the time we flipped back over and I noticed, distantly, that the sky was growing brighter. Shortly afterwards the weather unravelled with amazing speed. One moment I saw faint tendrils of light on the horizon; the next, it seemed, the sun burst through blue sky, and warmed our battered bodies as we lay sprawled on what was left of the raft. Two of its compartments sagged, punctured during the storm. If we had lost a third we would probably have sunk.

Our few possessions not lost forever were utterly waterlogged. My iPhone was still in my pocket but would never function again. We basked like reptiles in the sun, too exhausted by the effort of survival to speak or stand until that faraway ball of nuclear flame warmed and roused us a little.

Anya was the first to stand, and promptly reeled as if drunk; our collective sense of balance had been knocked more than a little askew.

“Anything?” Jesse asked, as she peered into the distance.

She shook her head. As the ramifications of that began to hit me, my relief at our survival began to warp into new fear. I had been operating on the simple assumption that enduring the storm meant survival. But if we had been blown far offshore, it only meant a longer and more lingering death by exposure.

“There’s a cloud bank,” she said, squinting. “That might mean land.”

“We should paddle that way,” Jesse said.

But we had no actual paddles, and without them we were unable to affect the raft’s course. We could splash at the water with our hands, or stick our legs in and kick, but in the end the ocean swept us where it would: in this case, parallel to and slightly away from that line of wispy clouds, deeper into the endless sea.

As the sun neared its zenith it became an enemy. The ocean lapped at our battered raft. A few birds skittered across the sky. Time crawled by meaninglessly, and my headache began to return.

I left Anya and Jesse to try to play sailor and huddled miserably beside Sophie in the bottom of the raft. Her trembling hand crept out and took mine. I squeezed it reassuringly. When that didn’t work, I reached out and took her into my arms. She held me gratefully.

I remembered what Lisa had said in the jungle about enjoying every moment, especially the bad ones, and I tried to savour my breaths, to relish this awful experience. It wasn’t easy. I reminded myself that we could have died back on the boat. Living only hours longer was still a bonus. Every second, every breath, was a precious gift.

“I’m really scared,” Sophie whispered into my ear.

I nodded. It had been better when we could do something and at least pretend to be captains of our fate. This drifting and drawn-out uncertainty, surrendered to the elements, was in its own quiet way worse than the storm.

“James,” Sophie murmured. “Listen. There’s something I need to tell you. Just in case. Listen carefully. My neural nets. There’s not just a kill switch. There’s a built-in override sequence you can use to seize control.”

I didn’t understand why she was talking technical trivia. “In case of what?”

“In case something happens to me. Let’s face it. I’m not exactly durable. If anyone doesn’t get out of this, it’ll be me.”

“Don’t even say that.”

“Shut up and listen. This might be important. You have to establish an SNP session first.” Serial Neural Protocol, the language Sophie had designed for her neural networks. “Then you send a particular character block, it looks like a public key, I sent an interleaved version to your Hushmail account a long time ago and told you it was a PGP key I wanted you to keep for me as backup. You remember that? You still have it?” I nodded. “Good. That’s the override sequence. After that all command packets you send are obeyed without question until you close the session.”

“A back door,” I said. “You built a back door into your own system. Why?”

“I’m sorry. There were so many things I should have told you. I’m so sorry. I just – it was like I didn’t know how.”

“Things like what?”

I couldn’t tell if the sound that followed was a laugh or a sob. “Like my name.”

I turned my head to look at her more directly. We were lying so close together that our noses touched. “Your name?”

“Listen.” Her voice was low but fraught. “When I was sixteen, I was just a kid, I did some bad things. Not just crimes. Really bad things. People died because of what I did. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have. And when I met you, after my dad died, I was trying to get away from all that, to reinvent myself, so it felt like I needed to obfuscate my past. Put all the bad things I’d done in a box and throw it away and not have it be part of my new life with you. You understand?”

I didn’t respond.

“I know that was crazy and stupid. But at the time it was what I needed to do. I was so messed up before I met you. You have no idea how good you’ve been for me. And I’ve wanted to tell you ever since, I swear, but I was scared. And the more I didn’t tell you, the bigger a deal it became, and the more scared I got, so the the harder it got to even think about bringing up the subject. Emotional negative feedback loop. I’m sorry. That’s no excuse. It wasn’t a secret I needed to keep from you, total opposite, it would have been so much better for both of us if I’d told you. But it was like I didn’t know how. And I really thought it was all behind me forever, dead and buried. But I guess Faulkner was right. And I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, that it’s coming out now, like this, when we’re already… ” she let that thought trail off unfinished, “but believe it or not, you know what, it’s such a relief to finally be telling you, even here, even like this. Even if it makes you want to punch me or something.”

“Telling me what? You changed your name?”

“I was born Sophia Ward, not Sophie Warren.”

After a stunned pause I pointed out, “You didn’t change it much.”

“Just enough to dodge most algorithms. This way I can’t get caught out by someone shouting my old name, and if I bump into someone who knew me, it sounds like they’re just misremembering. But to databases I’m a whole new woman.”

“Whole new woman from what?”

She sighed. “I’ll tell you the sordid details sometime when we get out of this, if you like. But honestly, they don’t matter, they’re not even relevant to my life any more. Except that’s the real reason I never took any military money for the lab. I’m a new woman according to the databases, but that wouldn’t stand up to a real background check.”

“Huh.”

“And also, maybe -” She licked her lips nervously. “You ever heard of a hacker named LoTek?”

“Sure. Of course. The only hacker ever made it onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, right? And then they took him off for no good reason.” Some thought LoTek had cut a deal with the feds; some claimed he had hacked into their systems and erased himself. I had never encountered anyone with a convincing claim to having actually met the living legend in meatspace. “Holy shit. That was you?” Everyone had always talked like LoTek was a man, but that didn’t mean anything.

“No. He’s the guy who had Jesse keep an eye on me.”

I started, looked up at Jesse, busy trying to steer the raft. He had known Sophie longer than I. I remembered something she had said on the boat, after we were captured, something that had prompted a look from Jesse: Now I know how low-tech felt. Not low-tech but LoTek. “Jesse‘s friends with LoTek?”

“Was. Sort of. I don’t know.”

Not just her but him too. My two closest friends in the world had been keeping huge secrets from me for years, treating me like a child who couldn’t be trusted with the truth. I didn’t even feel angry. Just empty.

“That’s all I can tell you now,” Sophie said.

“Whatever.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrugged as if disinterested. A defense mechanism. Sophie closed her eyes and tightened her grip on me. For awhile her breaths were long and shuddering. Then she slowly began to steady herself.

I told myself none of it mattered compared to the immediate question of whether we were all going to die here on this raft. We were drifting helplessly and no one knew we were out here except for the drug thugs trying to capture us. I wondered how long we would last before the sun killed us. They called it death by exposure, but it was really death by sunburn. It was so easy to forget, on land, in the shade, how deadly the tropical sun could be when you had no respite. We had nothing to cover ourselves, except maybe the raft itself, but turning it over and treading water would drain our strength.

A weird resentment towards fictional Pi took hold of me. He had been Indian and dark-skinned, he had only had a tiger to worry about, not sunburn and sunstroke and exposure. You could trick and evade a tiger. The sun was inescapable. Or maybe thirst would get us first. We had almost no fresh water. I gave us a couple of days at most.

“Wait,” Anya said sharply. “I saw something.”

Sophie and I sat halfway up.

“Where?” Jesse asked.

“Over there. A flash. Look!”

We looked. The ocean was an endless series of twenty-foot swells. A moment later we saw it too; a flicker of light, sun glinting off something in the distance.

“A paddle,” Jesse said. “Fishermen!”

We tried to call out to them, but they were too far away, and our voices too hoarse. Anya displayed an impressive talent for earsplitting howls, but even they were quickly swallowed up by the wind and the sea, and the fishing boat came no nearer. In fact, to our crushing dismay, it seemed to be moving further away.

Then Sophie said to me, “Your phone.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Give me your phone.”

“It’s dead. Soaked. We’re way out of signal range anyway.”

“I know. Give me.”

I passed it over. Water dripped from its innards. “What are you going to do?”

“Call them.”

“How?”

Sophie looked at the fishing boat, then up at the sun, calculating. She raised my iPhone, angled it carefully, and moved its screen back and forth through a small arc.

“Semaphore,” I said, catching on. The phone didn’t work, but its reflective screen could catch sunlight and flash it towards the fishing boat. If Sophie had figured the angles correctly, and if they had any curiosity at all -

“They’re coming!” Anya reported excitedly.

It was a crude wooden fishing boat, crewed by two men and four boys, dragging a hand-woven net. As they approached they stared at us as if we were aliens fallen from a distant star.

Jesse said, grinning, “Thank you, Steve Jobs.”

Chapter 32

Our attempts to communicate with the fishermen with high-school French failed utterly, but they took us on board their craft, brought in their net, attached a fraying yellow tow rope to our raft, and set out for what we hoped was land. We were too many for one boat, all our arms and legs were jumbled together in the middle, and once when we went over a big swell I nearly fell in before being rescued by a strong Haitian hand.

The oars squeaked in their ill-fitting locks, one of which was working itself loose with every stroke. The men were incredibly strong, and the boys scarcely less so. Jesse mimed an offer to paddle but they laughed at him. They occasionally glanced at Anya in her bikini, but paid her less attention than I would have expected.

The handful of fish in their net were amazingly bright, shining like silver in the sun. The water in the base of that overcrowded boat was not enough for them, and they thrashed and gasped convulsively. Twice Sophie and I started when a fish as long as my arm flopped against us, damp and clammy through the loose net, and the Haitians laughed. As the green line of the shore grew closer, the fish began to die, and their brightness faded.

The coast seemed deserted, rocky and forbidding. They brought us between two huge rocks into a lagoon we never would have discovered on our own. The water was turquoise, almost transparent. A huge whitewashed colonial-era mansion loomed like a mirage above a thin strip of beach where kids in rags played soccer, and a set of broken stone stairs which looked as ancient as Greek ruins. The lagoon was walled by steep, moss-covered rocks, above which coconut palms and bright green tropical foliage fluttered in the breeze. It would have been beautiful under any circumstances. After several consecutive near-death experiences it looked like Paradise.

The fishermen tried to talk to us as we approached the beach, but our mutual incomprehension was total. Eventually we realized from their gesticulations that they were asking for some kind of compensation. Jesse pulled out his empty pockets, pointed to the raft, and made an I-wash-my-hands-of-it gesture in their direction. The fishermen seemed unimpressed.

As we disembarked, the kids stopped their soccer and stared wide-eyed. It was strange to stand on land again. At first my legs shook with every step. It seemed equally strange that the sun was only halfway past its peak; we had been through so much that it felt like weeks, not hours, since our eggs-and-plantains breakfast. Now that we had reached some kind of safety my stomach surged and churned with hunger.

We ended negotiations with the increasingly irate fishermen by simply walking away from them, up the steps that led to the mansion – which was, we soon realized, a hotel. A visible discontinuity where new paint met old indicated that it had half-collapsed in the earthquake, and had since been rebuilt. We staggered onto its elegant verandah, collapsed onto its lacy metal chairs, and stared dumbly out at the now-placid Caribbean that had so nearly killed us all. The two others in attendance, an elderly and well-dressed white couple, observed us with ill-concealed bemusement. Moments later a black waiter in a white uniform joined us. I nearly laughed aloud. I felt like I had just stepped into a Luis Bunuel film.

“Madames, monsieurs?” he asked politely, obviously puzzled by the appearance of four bruised, battered, and thoroughly bedraggled white people on his verandah, but making the best of it. “Quelquechose a boire?”

I opened my mouth to order a Coke and realized we had no money. We had nothing at all but the clothes on our backs and the drowned carcass of my iPhone.

“I bet they’re already looking for us,” Jesse said grimly, just as the thought hit me too. “Four stranded white people on the south coast of Haiti aren’t exactly going to be hard to find. We’re a long way from safe.”

Our surreal refuge turned out to be the Hotel Cyvadier, only a few kilometres from the town of Jacmel. Its proprietor was a frail, white-haired Frenchwoman named Marie-Anne. I tried to explain our situation to her in my halting French: “Nous sommes perdus. Nous avons perdus tout. Nous devons telephoner nos amis au Port-au-Prince.”

She peered at us suspiciously through her thick glasses, then looked over at our waiter, frowning as if he were somehow responsible for our undesirable presence, before turning back to me. “Vous pouvez telephoner les policiers.”

“No,” Jesse objected. “The cops here are totally corrupt. Whoever sent that boat after us is probably already offering a reward for information.”

I tried to call the right words from the dusty attic of my brain. “Nous n’avons pas confiance au policiers ici.”

Marie-Anne looked at me for a moment as if trying to measure me, and then at the other three in the same way.

“S’il vous plait,” Anya said, her voice low and guttural, as if the plea had to be dragged reluctantly from her throat.

The old Frenchwoman sighed and nodded. Her expression softened from skepticism to sympathy. “Oui. Les policiers, les noirs ici… ” She shrugged. “Les meilleurs sont sans utile.”

The blatant racism made me uncomfortable, but I decided I wasn’t in any position to correct her bigotry. She spoke to the waiter with fast, harsh words that sounded almost but not quite like French. Haitian Creole, I surmised, the native tongue for 90% of Haiti’s population. Probably the fishermen had not understood us because they spoke no French at all.

The waiter, whose French had seemed excellent to me, waited patiently, nodded agreement, and departed. We looked uncertainly at each other, unclear about what had been decided, until he reappeared with a silver tray on which was set an ice bucket, four glasses, four bottles of ice-cold Coke, and a single Nokia cell phone.

I had never tasted anything quite so delicious as that sweet and violently fizzy bottle of Coca-Cola. As we drank, the waiter hovered over us, watching the phone as if we might grab it and pitch it into the ocean. Jesse picked it up, hesitated, and looked at Anya, who rolled her eyes and rattled a phone number at him. He nodded sheepishly and dialled. I was amazed there was a functioning cell network out here.

“Zavier,” he said, speaking loudly. “It’s Jesse. I need you to come to Jacmel, you understand? Jacmel, right away, immediatement. To the Hotel Cyvadier. Today. Aujourd’hui. Right now. As fast as you can. Vitesse. Vitesse. OK? D’accord?” His accent was painful: Jesse had taken only the minimum two years of French in high school before abandoning it in favour of more technical subjects. “Good. Bon. Merci.” He hung up and reported, “He’s coming. Now all we have to do is hope he beats the bad guys here.”

Anya shook her head. “Give me the phone. I’m going to call my uncle.”

Jesse looked reluctant. “Does he have people in Haiti?”

“He will send people. Or buy people.”

“Do we really need to get him involved?”

Sophie answered for her: “Jesse, right now we need all the help we can get.”

He frowned, conceded the point, and gave Anya the phone. She dialled a number from memory, paused a moment, then punched another long series of digits. I noticed Sophie watching carefully. A brief conversation in Russian ensued, with Anya sounding more passionate than she ever did in English.

“He is sending help,” she reported when it was over. “But it will take time. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.”

“Anya,” I said, wondering what kind of uncle had men to dispatch to Haiti on short notice, “who is your uncle?”

“Viktor Kharlamov.”

She said the name like I should know it, and it did ring a vague bell.

“We could call Clark or the DEA,” I suggested. “They might be able to… ” My voice trailed off. I doubted they had people on the ground in this failed state. They might call their compatriots here, but in this corrupt country, that might worsen our situation. Best to leave the authorities out of this for now. Once we got back to Port-au-Prince we could seek refuge at the American embassy. Until then we were better off on our own.

Anya passed the phone back to the grateful hands of our waiter.

“Grassfire,” Sophie said to Jesse. “This open source insurgency. Who are they?”

They exchanged a tense and meaningful look before he gave in and answered. “An open source insurgency isn’t a single organization. Grassfire includes dozens of groups and hundreds of individuals with one common objective, to unearth, publicize, and resist government brutality and tyranny across Latin America and the world. Working together independently, oxymoronic as it sounds.”

“Not oxymoronic at all,” Sophie said. “A swarm.”

Jesse squinted at her as if he didn’t know that word. “If you say so. I call them a network.” Sophie frowned her I-disapprove-of-your-imprecise-terminology frown, but let it slide. “They share information online, anyway. Information is basically all we gave any of the other groups. And a couple of our old prototype drones.”

“And my designs,” Sophie said sharply. “My neural nets.”

“Information, like I said. It’s not like you’re losing money. They could never have afforded to license them. They’re doing good work, and they couldn’t do it without the new technology.”

“Since when are you a do-gooder?” I asked skeptically.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face, forever,” Anya said unexpectedly. I recognized the quote: George Orwell. “Governments are dangerous to human liberty. More dangerous every year. It will be our faces under the boot soon if we don’t do something.”

I raised my hand to my wounded cheek, then yanked it away; the aching wound flared into volcanic agony when touched. I nodded at Jesse’s black eye. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but it’s our faces that just got beat up, because your oh-so-altruistic friends happen to be a front for drug dealers.”

“Even if that’s true,” Jesse said, “why would they come after us?”

“They weren’t after you. They were after Sophie.”

“Then why were they talking about Anya? And if you’re right, then we’re the goose laying golden eggs. Why cart us off to the slaughterhouse?”

I had no answer. He was right. “Then who?”

“I have no idea,” Jesse said.

“Stop it,” Anya interposed. “All this speculation is useless. When we get ourselves safe, then we can figure out what happened. It’s useless to argue like this now.”

She was right, and we all fell silent, but it was an uncomfortable silence. Jesse stared at the table. Anya looked meditative. Sophie looked out at the Caribbean. I wanted to ask her how much Jesse knew of her secrets. But all I could do was watch her and wonder exactly how much she had been hiding from me since the day she and I had first met.

We waited on the Hotel Cyvadier’s verandah for two hours. Marie-Anne, racist but hospitable, had the waiter bring us baskets of bread and carafes of water. Whoever said man cannot live on bread alone was never desperately hungry when a fresh baguette arrived at his table. The first one vanished in less than thirty seconds.

The few other guests, all white, watched us with curiosity and asked Marie-Anne about us. The hotel staff, all black, discussed us with each other. The interest level made me uneasy. It was all too easy to imagine the gossip being relayed to the nearby town of Jacmel, and thence to a Haitian police officer who had received word of a sizable reward for our arrest and delivery. My stomach lurched with sour tension every time a vehicle pulled into the Cyvadier’s gravel parking lot.

But the first to come looking for us was Zavier and his golden smile, driving a Toyota so old, rusted, and battered that it looked more like a work of modern art than a functional vehicle. Sophie and I were delighted to see him. Anya and Jesse were not.

“Where’s the Land Cruiser?” Jesse demanded of him before he even reached our table. “The big car, where is it?”

Zavier shook his head ruefully. “I could not. The police, I could not.”

“The police? What?”

The big black man grimaced. I thought I recognized his pained expression: he wanted to explain a complex concept in a language he only barely spoke.

“Est-ce que tu parles francais?” I asked.

He looked at me gratefully and burst into a stream of fast and accented French. I hardly understood any of it, but eventually, between his broken English, my broken French, and Jesse and Anya’s grasp of context, we came to understand that Zavier had gone to the walled property they maintained in Port-au-Prince to get their Land Cruiser, but found it occupied by the police, who had wanted to arrest him. He had gotten away by dint of some clever piece of subterfuge; I didn’t quite understand the details of his deception, but I understood that he was quite proud of it. With the Land Cruiser unavailable he had come here in his own car.

“Shit,” Jesse said morosely, when the picture was clear.

“We can go to the our embassies,” I suggested. “They’ll arrange temporary passports. We can fly out.” Then I looked at Anya and wondered if there even was a Russian embassy in Haiti. But surely the USA would take care of her too. At least long enough to detain her for interrogation.

“First we have to get to Port-au-Prince,” Jesse said. “Let’s get a move on.”

Chapter 33

We walked gingerly to the Toyota; bare feet and gravel are a painful combination. Jesse claimed the passenger seat. I rode with my knees pressed painfully up against its back. The Corolla’s seats were threadbare and much-patched, the back doors opened only from outside, one window was stuck shut and the other half-open, the seat belts were only a memory, and the radio was a ragged, gaping hole. The shocks were gone, and every bump of Haiti’s obstacle-course roads went straight to my spine. But the tires looked fine, and the oft-repaired engine ran remarkably smoothly.

The road was rutted mud, still wet from the storm. We passed very briefly through Jacmel, a crumbling town of rotting concrete and earthquake-ravaged rubble juxtaposed with ancient colonial buildings that had somehow survived the earth’s violence, all hidden behind high walls and metal grilles that made it clear this was or had been a city of random violence. It seemed all grey, beige, and brown; any vivid colours had long since faded beneath the relentless tropical sun. The single exception, the bright lights and logo of its one Elf gas station, seemed jarringly out of place.

The city’s denizens viewed us with placid curiosity, if they noticed us at all. Zavier’s battered Toyota blended well with other Haitian traffic. On the way out of town, just before we began to climb up into the hills, we passed a small airstrip. A small plane had just landed, and was disgorging men. Hispanic men. One had an odd, stiff-legged gait.

The pilot of the boat that had come to seize the Argus. The man behind him was the snaggle-toothed gunman who had fired his AK-47 over our heads. To my profound relief, neither looked up as the Toyota passed.

“Don’t look now,” I said in a low voice, “but the vulture has landed.”

Naturally everyone looked. Jesse grunted with surprise.

“Half an hour for them to get to the hotel,” Sophie said tersely. “Ten minutes to work out where we’re going. We better take an alternate route or they’ll intercept.”

I transmitted this idea to Zavier.

“C’est pas possible,” he said. “I am sorry. There is only one road from Jacmel to Port-au-Prince.”

It was a road that should have been sponsored by Six Flags. It wound through steep hills, and along huge sheer cliffs, with no protective fencing. At least it was recently paved, no doubt thanks to post-quake reconstruction, and the view was glorious; an endless panorama of mist-wreathed green ridges, shot through with rocky crags, beneath a blood-red sunset. We passed the occasional quarry, roadside building, fruit vendor, or plot of farmed land, but most of these highlands seemed still untamed.

I would have appreciated it more if I hadn’t been so miserable. The low-grade headache that had plagued me since being rifle-whipped was throbbing worse and worse, and my stomach churned uneasily as Zavier whipped the car around tight switchbacks. He at least was enjoying himself. Outside the car he was stern and wooden, but a small smile played on his face when he drove. Anya had closed her eyes and was breathing deeply through her nose, maybe meditating, her perfect face slack and empty. Beside me Sophie too had retreated to her own world of pure intellect. Her eyes were open, but even when the turns threw her against me or Anya, her expression betrayed no awareness.

The sun sank behind the western hills with amazing speed. Only one of the Toyota’s headlights stabbed into the near-absolute darkness that followed. The police roadblock was around the corner from a sharp turn. We didn’t see its lights until we were less than fifty feet away.

Zavier braked the Toyota to a sharp stop, jolting us all out of our reveries. It took me a few seconds to come to grips with the situation. The roadblock consisted of a big log laid across the road, and four men with guns in ill-fitting uniforms: Haitian police, not UN peacekeepers. A car sat parked behind the log, engine running, headlights illuminating the scene. On both sides of us the road ended at a not-quite-cliff.

I sat up straight, my heart thumping, tried to breathe deeply but my lungs seemed unable to expand. The voice that emerged from my throat was nasal and strangled: “Is this normal?”

“No,” Jesse said quietly.

Two uniformed men approached the Toyota, moving lazily, guns holstered on their hips. I told myself that was a good sign, and glanced over at Sophie beside me. She was watching but utterly motionless, like a wax dummy. I could hear her breath thick in her throat.

Zavier exchanged a few laconic words with the men in Creole. They didn’t seem particularly interested. One seemed about to turn and walk away – but the other leaned down, looked past Zavier, and saw our four white faces. For a moment he stared at us with naked amazement. Then his expression hardened, it was like seeing a steel mask come down over his face, and he pulled Zavier’s door open and barked a command.

Before Zavier could move, Jesse said, urgently, “Zavier, get us to Port-au-Prince and I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”

The big man with the golden teeth hesitated, looked up, asked a question. The man outside repeated his order, louder this time, a note of anger in his voice.

Zavier raised his hands in a peaceable, easy-now expression, turned to Jesse, awarded him one of his glittering smiles, and said, “OK.”

His right hand fell onto the stick shift, his left hand onto the wheel – and suddenly the Toyota’s engine roared into life. We had stopped about five feet from the roadblock log. Zavier spun the wheel one-handed, gunning us around it, while power-shifting into second. The whole vehicle lurched and tilted drunkenly by about thirty degrees as the left-hand tires went off the road and onto the steep downhill slope, while those on the other side flashed inches past the tip of the log. The uniformed men had only begun to shout with outraged disbelief as Zavier crashed into third gear and accelerated away. The whole stunt-driving maneuver occupied less than three seconds.

“Zavier,” Anya said in a taut but giddy voice, as the roadblock lights faded away behind us, “you should drive for Formula One.”

Zavier’s chuckle was deep and throaty. “Lewis Hamilton,” he advised us. “He is the best.”

Chapter 34

“What about that UN checkpoint on the way in?” I asked, as Zavier piloted us down the winding road at stomach-wrenching speeds, through darkness so total that the windows seemed draped in black velvet. “Do you think they’ll stop us?”

“There’ll be more police checkpoints, too,” Jesse said grimly. “Those guys had radios. Maybe we should have Zavier drop us off as soon as we get into cell coverage and try to make it on foot.”

“We won’t have a prayer,” Sophie objected.

Anya said, “Maybe my uncle’s men will find us first.”

“Zavier,” I said. “Est-ce que c’est possible attainer Port-au-Prince et eviter les policiers?” I wasn’t sure if “attainer” and “eviter” were actual French words, but figured he would get the gist.

“Oui,” he responded.

“How? Comment?”

Zavier flicked a glance over at Jesse. “Ten thousand dollars.”

“Yes. Cash.”

“Then I take you to Port-au-Prince. After we go down, after,” Zavier tried to think of a word, gave up, and took his hand off the steering wheel to mime the notion of hills, “there are other roads. Other roads, no police.”

We all breathed easier after hearing that. Until we turned off the highway, and onto those other ‘roads’: dirt tracks wrenched into tortured landscapes by the rainy season.

The Toyota bounced and rattled along at maybe ten miles an hour. Our lone headlight illuminated endless fields, only occasionally leavened by the silhouette of a building, an animal, or even a tree. It occurred to me that I had seen hardly any trees in Haiti. For the most part it was like driving through a dead and blasted land.

At one point the car got stuck in mud outside a tent city of earthquake refugees and we all had to get out and push it free. The night air was cool and damp, the flapping of the tents in the breeze sounded like some kind of dying animal, and a small crowd of solemn-faced Haitians in rags grew around us as we worked, watching silently, as if we might suddenly disappear if they spoke. Their wordless gazes felt like a terrible burden and it was a relief to get moving again. After that I couldn’t really fall asleep, I had mud caked all over me and was too tense and nervous, but I slipped into a kind of waking daze. Sophie’s head rested heavily on my shoulder but I could tell from her breath that she too was still awake.

When I noticed ragged wooden huts, and people sleeping in rags in the mud, I sat up and began to look groggily around. Dawn had stained the eastern sky. Smoke curled into the air from a couple of open fires, and I heard the distant growl of a dirt bike.

“Are we there yet?” I asked foggily, like a child.

“Soon,” Zavier assured me. “Soon.’

The slums grew denser. The sun rose, and wildly colourful taptaps began to pass us, jammed full of early-morning passengers. We passed high walls painted with the colourful logos of Bintang beer and Comme Il Faut cigarettes. Zavier stopped at a Total station to fill up. From there the road was paved, and busy with traffic, until we crossed a bridge and turned down a steep, muddy track into an urban valley between and below two busy major roads, near what might once have been a creek but was now a sewer.

The water was clogged with an amazingly dense and kaleidoscopic mass of filth and garbage. About twenty feet away from its edge there began a shantytown of a thousand tin huts and narrow mud pathways, barely big enough for two to walk abreast. There was so much earthquake damage that it looked like some low-rent Godzilla had gone on a random walk through the neighbourhood and reduced half its buildings to rubble. Even the intact ones were invariably cracked and skewed. Above them, a madman’s spiderweb of improvised electrical wiring hung from leaning wooden poles that looked homemade. Zavier parked the Toyota at the edge of this interstitial hive.

“Where are we?” I couldn’t imagine why we had stopped in such an awful place.

“Chez moi,” he explained. “My home. Vous pouvez rester ici.”

Three other vehicles sat parked at the edge of the shantytown. All were in even worse shape than Zavier’s Toyota. The rusting carcasses of two more lay nearby, half-buried in silted mud and garbage. We emerged from the car and stared at the sea of poverty and filth.

“You know things are bad when this is your refuge,” Jesse said gloomily.

Two neighbourhood kids ran up and began to chatter to Zavier. Moments later they were joined by a young woman, and then an old man. Soon a dozen people surrounded him, calling for his attention. He spoke to them briefly and powerfully, seemingly dictating the solution to some local dispute, and they listened with careful attention. Around us Zavier seemed hesitant, deferential, even submissive, but in the shantytown his body language and tone of voice were those of a king.

Crisis apparently resolved, he turned back to us and said, “You come with me.”

Zavier’s home was one of the shantytown’s largest, which wasn’t saying much: it was maybe twenty feet square, made of sheets of corrugated tin set directly into the mud. The roof was held down with heavy stones. Gaps were patched with sheets of canvas or plastic bags. We had to stoop as we entered the curtained opening that served as a door, to avoid banging our heads.

Inside was nicer. A selection of ratty carpets mostly covered the dirt floor. There were cushions and stools to sit on, a little stove, and a big wooden box in which various plastic and metal subcontainers rested, some full of rice and beans. A solidly built woman with a weathered face, dressed in a red-and-white dress, was boiling water and frying plantains on the stove. Four children of varying ages slept on ragged blankets. A wooden counter that had once been a sawhorse held four piles of clean blue-and-white clothing, school uniforms, folded and stacked with reverential attention. They had made lemonade out of the earthquake’s lemons by running a clothesline between two parallel cracks. On the wall opposite, a crucifix hung between two small and strangely detailed painted human figures, one made of wood, one of carved bone. Later I realized those were voodoo fetishes.

The woman stared at us with naked amazement for a moment, then looked at Zavier. He and she – his wife, I supposed – conversed briefly in Creole. The discussion woke their children, who were thrilled and astonished by their foreign visitors, and rushed to us in their underwear despite the best attempts of their parents to restrain them. The resulting uproarious chaos broke the awkward mood and soon we were all laughing.

The children interrogated us first in Creole and then in French, which the older two, both girls, spoke remarkably well. “Vous etes du quel pays?” the first asked. After I explained our nationalities, the other wanted to know “Vous avez venir ici dans une aeroplane?” Before I could answer, their youngest son demanded, to the hilarity of all, “Vous connaissez David Beckham?”

Laughter came surprisingly easily considering how many bullets we had dodged over the last twenty-four hours. Now that we were in a safe place at last, life felt inexpressibly full of sumptuous splendours, and the squalor of Zavier’s house seemed as delightful as a castle. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so giddily, unreasonably happy. Zavier’s wife, who didn’t speak French, seemed to want to apologize for our breakfast of rice, beans, and plantains, but it tasted better than that at any three-star Michelin restaurant. There was a lot to be said for dicing with death and winning.

“What are you going to do with your money?” I asked Zavier. “Qu’est-ce que tu ferai avec son argent?” I was never quite sure when to use the formal vous and when the familiar tu, but I figured the latter was probably a safe choice when talking to a man who had recently saved my life several times.

“I will buy a taptap,” Zavier said, flashing his golden teeth in a dreamy smile. “Maybe two taptaps. To bring me income. They will buy school for my children, and a house with water and electricity. I will drive one when I want, and when I do not, other men will drive for me, and I will stay with my family.”

I had to admit the notion sounded pretty paradisical.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked as we finished the last fragments of breakfast, after Zavier’s wife had dressed his children in their precious uniforms and escorted them off to school.

Anya, Jesse and Sophie looked at one another. For a moment I was glad to be the ordinary guy in a room full of genius. It meant I could turn my mind off and just follow along when decisionmaking seemed too troubling. And our problems had by no mean ended; we were still on the run with no money and no ID, nothing to our names but our clothes and Zavier’s assistance.

Chapter 35

Jesse said, “I’d like to have a better idea of what the hell is going on before I made any decisions.”

“You and me both,” I agreed.

I tried to make sense of things. Sophie’s autonomous UAV technology had filtered to a drug cartel via Anya and Jesse’s friends in the Grassfire initiative, the so-called open source insurgency. I suspected Sophie had already known this before the DEA came. The drug cartel wanted at least one of us alive; that was why they had let us get away in the raft. But who? Anya? They had known her name. But it stretched credulity to believe it was just coincidence that they had attacked the day after Sophie and I arrived.

Sophie was by far the most important of us. Her designs, her Axon neural nets, were years ahead of anyone else’s. Whoever they were, what they wanted was Sophie in their labs, working for them.

But the more I thought about that theory, the less plausible it seemed. Just a few days ago they had attacked us with mortars that could easily have killed her. So why did they now want her alive? Could the pirates who had seized the Ark Royale and the narco-traffickers who had attacked us in Colombia be two different groups, with different motives?

Jesse said to Sophie, echoing my own thoughts, “Look, I guess I get why someone’s after you. It’s like that defecting researcher story in Count Zero. Except more like a hostile takeover. But why me and Anya?”

“I can’t say for sure,” Sophie said. “But all three of you have had years of experience working with my neural nets. That makes you potential rivals.”

“Rivals?” Jesse asked.

“You have to understand, everything is different now. Kamikaze drones, UAVs as weapons, that’s a game-changer by itself. But networking them, and putting them on the global cellular network, that is a major world-changing paradigm shift. Like having magic bullets you can fire from anywhere on Earth to kill anyone else, so long as you know where they are. It’s difficult to underestimate the ramifications. Every other weapon in the world just became obsolete.”

“A new arms race,” I suggested.

“Not quite. Arms race implies multiple contestants. But right now the only people with access to this technology, not just drones but networked drones, swarms capable of operating autonomously in urban environments, are whoever sent them after us, and the people in this room.”

I looked around the tin shack. It was hard to believe that if Sophie was right, it contained four of the most dangerous people on the planet. Even harder to believe that I was one of them.

“That can’t be right,” Anya objected. “The US military must have their own.”

“The US military is at least two years behind. Probably more.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Jesse asked.

“I’ve taken meetings with them. They’ve been trying to hire me for years. Told me all about their state of the art while they were at it. They’ve got plenty of remote-controlled stuff, especially the Army. Driverless vehicles, some interesting dog-like robots that can carry things across rough ground, things like that. But they’re very reluctant to use autonomous weaponized UAVs. It goes against military culture, and unlike terrorists they can’t take the political risk of them going rogue and killing civilians. And what’s more, they absolutely refuse to use neural nets.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they’re not testable, in the way that the military understands testing. Normal procedural software, lines of code, they get that. But you can’t disassemble a neural net into its parts and show exactly how it works or what algorithms it uses, so you can’t formally prove what it will do in a given situation. That’s not good enough for the military mind. Which puts them years behind the times. They’re two, maybe three hardware generations away from procedural software replicating what my drones do today in real time.”

“Other research labs?” Anya suggested.

Sophie shook her head. “It’s a small field. I know them all in person. They could build basic drones with simple navigation, but chasing us around a crowded city like that, avoiding obstacles? No way. I’m years ahead of them too.”

“Whoever controls the nets, controls the drones. Whoever controls the drones, controls the Spice. Whoever controls the Spice, controls the universe!” I intoned, paraphrasing Dune, hoping to lighten the moment.

“Something like that,” Sophie said, expressionless.

“Makes the whole notion of military defense a joke,” Jesse mused. “Doesn’t matter how many guns and tanks and jets and submarines you’ve got. Autonomous drones can go right past them and pretty much kill and destroy whoever and whatever they want.”

Sophie nodded coolly. “Smart drones against previous-generation military tech is like bows and arrows against clubs, or tanks against cavalry, or air power against tanks.”

I stared at them both. I had thought I was joking.

I remembered what Sophie had said at the Holiday Inn: If things go wrong, a lot of people are going to die. I was beginning to realize what she meant. If Jesse was right, drug cartels killing DEA agents was only the merest tip of an iceberg towards which the entire world was hurtling at full speed, in blissful ignorance, like the Titanic.

“The military implications are just the beginning,” she went on. “The first Internet revolution connected immobile computers. The second one, mobile devices like phones. Now we’re on the cusp of the third. Networked self-propelled devices. They’re going to change everything, not just wars. Economies. Societies. Everyone’s lives.”

“And you say the US military has nothing to stop this kind of drone attack, nothing comparable,” Anya said, still sounding incredulous.

“It’s not like they confided all their secrets in me. But as far as I can tell, they’re always trying to fight the last war over again and get it right this time. Right now their planning is all about urban insurgencies. Drone war wouldn’t even be war as they understand it. No fronts, no territory, not even any soldiers. Just a handful of launch sites and a few people sitting at laptops, orchestrating the network.”

“And a few factories beforehand.” I was trying to think aloud of reasons why she couldn’t be right. “That’s what I want to know. We know about the software. What about the hardware? Where are these things physically coming from?”

“Taiwan,” Jesse suggested. “Malaysia. Germany. California. China. A bunch of companies that take the designs, churn out the parts, and don’t know or care what they’re for as long as the money’s good. Ain’t globalization a bitch?”

I smiled sourly.

“It’s not just my software,” Sophie said unexpectedly. “My work is the foundation, but I spent a couple days analyzing that drone we found in Colombia. I think whoever built it actually evolved its neural net, expanded its capabilities. Which means they’ve got some very smart people working for them.”

We absorbed that news in silence for a moment.

“Well, that’s just great,” I muttered. “Like things weren’t bad enough already. But the question is, what do we do now?”

“I think we should call the US embassy,” Sophie said. “They can get us passports, guarantee our security.”

I became aware of an odd sound in the distance, tickling at the very edge of my hearing.

“That will be a good trick, considering that you are the only American here,” Anya pointed out.

Sophie smiled at Anya. “These days you’re whatever your passport says you are. I’m sure they’ll give you temporary ID to get you out of here and back to the USA.”

“Where Jesse and I will promptly be arrested.” Anya said tartly. “No, thank you. We will be safer with my uncle than your embassy.”

I suddenly remembered where I had heard her uncle’s name before. “Holy shit. Viktor Kharlamov. The dissident billionaire. The one who lives in London. The one the Russians tried to assassinate. That’s your uncle?”

“That’s him,” Anya agreed. “Uncle Viktor.”

I looked at Sophie, stunned, and expecting the same from her; but she took it in stride. Or maybe she had already known.

That strange, tantalizingly familiar sound was growing louder, and warping slightly. Not in the shantytown, but above it, incoming -

“Holy shit.” The awful realization hit me. “A drone, that’s a drone, they must have tracked Zavier’s phone from when we called from the hotel.”

I leapt to my feet but I knew it was already too late. The motor’s whine was too loud. It was no more than a few hundred feet away, and coming fast.

Chapter 36

I emerged from the hut just in time to see the enemy drone soar past, fifty feet overhead. Around me the shantytown’s denizens emerged from their hovels and stared up in wonder as the drone began to circle. I wanted to warn them away, but held my tongue: if it had been sent to divebomb Zavier’s phone and explode, we would already have been reduced to bloody smears. It was on a recon mission, not kamikaze.

Anya appeared beside me, followed shortly by Jesse and Sophie. We all craned our necks as the UAV flew tight circles above us.

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Jesse said, “but why aren’t we dead?”

“Maybe it isn’t armed,” Anya suggested.

I shook my head. “Haiti’s their major transshipment point. I’m sure they have bombs here. We’re alive because they want at least one of us alive. Come on. There’s a camera and a radio on that thing, we have to lose it.”

“How?”

“Zavier!” I called. “We have to go. Il faut qu’on sort immediatement. Et laisse ton telephone ici!”

The drone followed us to the Toyota, and stayed with us as we remerged into Port-au-Prince’s maddeningly slow midday traffic. We headed downtown. When I stuck my head out of the window and looked up I saw it flying in lazy circles. All around us people pointed and stared at the mysterious skyborne interloper.

I wondered if its onboard neural net could track our vehicle, or if someone was guiding it manually. I wondered how far away the enemy’s ground troops were. Our drones could fly for six hours; circling ate up more power than cruising, but we couldn’t count on outlasting the thing above us, especially as it was built of carbon fibre, strong as steel but as light as the bones of a bird. We had to somehow lose it.

“Zavier,” I said, “Are there any road tunnels in Port-au-Prince?” I tried to think of the French for ‘tunnel’ and failed. “Underground!” I motioned with my hand.

He looked at me as if I were crazy. Then a light went on in his eyes, and he smiled conspiratorially, and confided: “J’ai une idee.”

Zavier leaned on his horn, stomped on his accelerator, and swerved the Toyota directly into oncoming traffic. I gasped, Sophie grabbed my arm, all Zavier’s passengers thought we were going to die right there, but the oncoming taptap veered into the middle of the road as we caught the asphalt’s outside edge. I glimpsed its driver’s face as we passed. He didn’t seem even slightly fazed.

Zavier directed us up a steep side road I wouldn’t even have noticed, between two high stone walls half-overgrown with vines. There were tall trees behind both walls. For a moment I hoped that the drone might get caught in them, but it climbed and stayed above us as we rattled up the vertiginous cobblestoned street. The Toyota vibrated so violently that I couldn’t even speak. We crested the hill and descended past more walls, these ones topped with barbed wire and shards of broken glass, until suddenly they ended and we were back amid mud and tin huts; a long, narrow shantytown that followed the path of a power corridor.

The huge electrical towers that stood two by two looked like frameworks for massive human figures, motionless and stoic, bearing the wires draped over their shoulders and knees for the good of the city. They were not well-maintained: I could hear the crackling buzz of arcing electricity, could practically feel their hum. The shantytowns ran right up to the base of the power towers. It was a fantastically dangerous place to live, and in other circumstances the sight would have been harrowing – but just then I could not have been more delighted.

I stuck my head out of the window in time to see the drone falter and wobble as the rogue electromagnetic fields drove its circuitry and communications haywire. Then it gave up the struggle and fell, lifeless. A wingtip hit a power cable and it cartwheeled through the sky, banged into a tower, fell like a stone to the mud beneath, and lay crumpled and dead.

“Zavier,” I said, “you’re a genius.”

He smiled modestly. I noticed that top of the drone was painted with green camouflage patterns, like soldiers’ jungle uniforms, except for the two darkly gleaming solar panels.

“I’d like to take a look at it,” Sophie said.

“No!” Anya objected. “We don’t have time. They know where we are.”

She was right, and Sophie knew it, but she looked wistful as Zavier drove us away, along a rocky road that climbed back towards Port-au-Prince’s main highway, following a taptap that was an ancient school bus encrusted by crude repairs and scintillating colours, like coral grown on a sunken ship. About halfway up we hit more traffic, and I groaned.

“What now?” I asked. Our small victory had brought us little closer to safety. “They know where we are. We can’t go back to Zavier’s. We can’t even use his phone.”

“Zavier,” Jesse said, “take us to the American Embassy.”

“No,” Anya contradicted him. “Not the Americans. We must wait for my uncle.”

“We don’t have time,” Jesse said. “Zavier, the embassy. They won’t arrest us, they don’t have jurisdiction. We’ll hide out there until your uncle’s men show up. No choice. It’s the only safe place in Port-au-Prince.”

Anya grudgingly acquiesced.

But we never made it to the embassy. As we crested the hill, moving slowly in the thickening downtown-bound traffic, we saw two black Mercedes with tinted windows climbing towards us. Compared to the rusted hulks and rainbow taptaps around them they looked like two sharks amid schools of tropical fish.

We all knew immediately what they were: the enemy’s ground troops. I grunted as if punched in the stomach. Neither the the embassy nor Viktor Kharlamov could help us. It was already too late.

The road was too narrow for Port-au-Prince’s usual improvised third lane of traffic, and the stone walls on either side were high and topped by broken glass. The oncoming traffic was thin, the two black cars were moving fast. Not even Zavier could turn his Toyota around before they reached us, it would be something like an eleven-point turn. In our haste to escape we had trapped ourselves.

Chapter 37

I was probably the stupidest person in that car but it didn’t take a genius to see that there was only one way for some of us to get away. It was Sophie, Jesse, and Anya they wanted, not me. I didn’t matter.

If I had stopped and thought about it, I doubt I would have done anything, but there was no time. “Zavier, get them out of here,” I said, as I opened my door.

“What are you doing?” Sophie demanded.

Instead of answering I leapt out, sprinted up to the school-bus taptap ahead of us, climbed onto the little ladder that led to its driver’s door, and pulled it open. The driver looked down at me, utterly astonished by the sudden appearance of a desperate white man. His passengers were similarly astounded. I took advantage of the moment of shock to grab him by his shirt and pull him hard out of his seat. He was heavy, but I had the strength of panic. He was so surprised that he didn’t even cry out as he toppled past me onto the road.

“Sorry, desolee,” I muttered as I leapt up into his seat, hoping he wasn’t hurt. The two men in the passenger seat shouted with stunned outrage as I grabbed the wheel of the taptap, spun it counterclockwise, and stomped on the accelerator. Fortunately for me he had left it in gear, and we didn’t have far to go.

Strong hands grabbed at me from behind and from my right – but then we hit the wall on the opposite side of the road, and they lost their grip. My body slid forward in the seat and I smacked chest-first into the steering wheel, hard enough to bruise. I ignored the pain, used that last moment of freedom to rip the keys from the ignition, step back out onto the top rung of the latter with one foot, and lob the keys over the wall with an underhanded throw, leaving the taptap stranded diagonally across the road, blocking both lanes, with the Mercedes on one side and Zavier’s Toyota on the other.

I had entertained vague hopes of getting back into the getaway car, but then the taptap driver loomed beneath me, unhurt and enraged, grabbing at my legs as his passengers shoved me out of the vehicle from behind. I fell hard onto the rocky ground, was barely able to get my arms up so that they instead of my face took the blow.

As I fought my way to my knees I glimpsed Sophie’s frantic expression as she stared at me from the Toyota’s window, aghast. Then it roared away, and I sagged with relief.

Passengers spilled out of the taptap, shouting furiously. For a second I hoped I might only be arrested – but then two muscular black men in aviator sunglasses, designer jeans and sportcoats appeared in the ragged ring of passengers around me, and parted that mob like the Red Sea. The angry cacophony faded suddenly into frightened silence. It was like the newcomers were lepers or angels of death.

I got up and tried to smile at them. It didn’t work. The first one to me punched me in the gut. I doubled over retching and he kicked me to the ground. Then they were on me, the weight of their bodies mashing my face and ribs against the rock and mud, wrenching my shoulders into agony as they bound my arms behind my back and tied a cloth around my head to blind me. It all happened in seconds, they were professionals.

They half-dragged, half-carried me along the road until I collided with something at thigh level. Strong hands pushed my torso onwards, others grabbed at my legs and tried to upend me. I thrashed with blind panic until another gun butt slammed into my kidneys; then I just curled into a fetal position and moaned as my captors half-shoved, half-lifted me onto some kind of ledge. I smelled rubber and gasoline. Then metal slammed on metal just above me, and everything went dark. It wasn’t until the engine roared to life, seemingly all around me, that I understood I was trapped in the trunk of their car.

Part 3. Captivity

Chapter 38

The vehicle rumbled and thumped across Port-au-Prince’s potholes. I tried to fumble for some kind of tool, in books and movies the hero always found a piece of broken glass or sharp metal corner to free himself, but there was nothing like that in this trunk. Even if there had been, my wrists were bound so tightly that my fingers were growing numb and useless. I heard a distant police siren, and hoped; but it faded away.

The tiny space stank of gasoline, and my brain and body began to fill with nausea and a stabbing headache. There were no air holes. It was like being buried alive. I felt panic squirm in my gut like an animal, trying to break free and possess me wholly, and I focused on keeping it caged. From the front I heard dim conversation, and that sound of human voices helped. I tried to breathe slowly, deeply. The gasoline fumes felt like sandpaper on my throat.

The car climbed steeply and I rolled back against its very rear. I felt like an animal being herded to the slaughterhouse. It was all I could do not to hyperventilate. My guts felt cold and loose and watery, like they might literally fall apart. I tried to think about something other than what they would do to me, but all my brain came up with was the Tragically Hip song Locked in the trunk of a car, which didn’t help. I tried to treat the moment as a gift, as Lisa had taught me, but failed. Lisa had also told me what the narcos did to their enemies.

The car stopped. The trunk opened. My blindfold was sufficiently translucent that I was aware of being washed in sunlight as two strong men lifted me out like a carpet, carried me up a ramp, and sat me on a small metal chair that seemed bolted down. I heard faint roars and whines over my own hyperventilation. They sounded oddly familiar for a second, and then I placed them: airport noises, airplanes in motion. I was still in transit, in a plane that would take me to Colombia. I gasped with relief at the realization that I would not be tortured or murdered in the next few minutes. I had hours yet. Anything could happen, I told myself, in a few hours.

My hands hung half-senseless behind me. I tried to work my fingers and wrists, remembering vaguely that tensing and releasing muscles had been part of Houdini’s arsenal of bondage-busting tricks. The whole airplane vibrated as its engines started up. Their noise was like a city screaming. The plane shuddered into motion, halted briefly, then rocketed forward as its engines howled with the strain. We climbed so rapidly that my stomach lurched.

Locked in the trunk of a car includes the line ‘Well, you could say I became chronologically fucked up.’ Gord Downie knew whereof he sang. I lost all track of time during that flight. My brain worried at the subject of what would happen to me like a dog gnawing on a bone, and I couldn’t pull it free. Images of the worst kinds of torture, rape, degradation and mutilation churned ceaselessly in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t believe that they actually seemed plausible. I wondered at what point I might decide to try to kill myself, bite my own tongue off and choke myself with the severed stump like in Million Dollar Baby. My limbs felt as weak as water. The air was warm but I shivered uncontrollably, panting like a dog. My muscles were so uncontrollably tense that my legs began to cramp. The malarial miasma of utter terror feels like a bad flu, only worse.

It could have been hours or days before something shifted inside me, some indistinct proprioceptive signal of deceleration and descent. Soon after the airplane wobbled as it became earthborne. We slowed so rapidly that I slewed forward and nearly off the chair.

They carried me out like a sack of rice. In the frenzy of activity my blindfold loosened a little, so I could see a sliver of the world with my left eye. I tried not to reveal this tiny victory with my body language, didn’t dare scan my surroundings, but as I was hoisted into a waiting van I caught a glimpse of a sign, written in Spanish. I understood only a single word: Mexico.

That was so unexpected it kicked my brain into speculative gear again. Sheer coincidence? Or had I been wrong about Colombia?

The van drove for a long time. I couldn’t make out our surroundings through its curtained windows except that we were in a city. Men sat beside and in front of me, chatting excitedly in Spanish, until someone ordered them to shut up.

We halted long enough for a gate to grind open, cruised into a kind of courtyard filled with vehicles, and stopped. I could barely feel my hands at all. They dragged me out of the van, laughed when I barked my head painfully against its roof. I was taken into a building, up stairs, along corridors, through what felt like an endless labyrinth. Strong hands untied my wrists and shoved me forward. I staggered and nearly fell.

With my numbed fingers it took me several attempts to pull off the blindfold and reveal a room full of whiteboards and server racks. Laptops sat on a few haphazardly arranged metal desks, accompanied by Aeron chairs. Bits of disassembled hardware lay clumped on the floor. Despite the white-noise hum of several air conditioners the air was warm with the heat from the dozens of blade servers. It felt like the nerve centre of a software startup with big aspirations. Most importantly, it did not seem like the kind of room in which people were tortured to death.

The man who had escorted me in was short but hugely muscled. His ropy arms were covered by demonic tattoos, and his shirt said MONSTER 666. The room’s other occupant sat behind a desk crowded untidily with papers. He looked Slavic, not Hispanic; tall and gangly, with lanky hair so blond and skin so pale that he was almost albino. He smiled with uneven teeth, and gestured at a chair. It took me a second to understand his meaning. I walked over and sat down.

“So you’re James Kowalski,” he said thoughtfully, examining me carefully, like I was a meal he might want to send back to the kitchen.

I nodded. Language seemed almost beyond me. I tried to control my trembling limbs. As feeling returned to my hands, they felt doused in flaming sulphuric acid.

“I’m Dmitri.” He stressed the name as if I should recognize it.

“Nice to meet you,” I muttered automatically, and ridiculously.

He chuckled. “I doubt that.”

I didn’t say anything. I was terrified that anything might condemn me.

“We are very disappointed in you, James.” His accent was Russian, but his English was so fluid that he had to have spent years in America. “Were you trying to cover your tracks? Or play both sides? Either way, it was a very stupid thing to do.”

He looked at me as if waiting for a response, but I couldn’t even make sense of his questions, much less find an answer.

“So many smart people are so very stupid outside their area of expertise. You know this, but you never imagined that you too might be one of them. And now that you know, it is too late.” Dmitri shook his head sadly, as if he had just intoned my epitaph. “Did you really believe nobody would ever find the money? The gnomes of Zurich and the Caymans, even they are not immune to pressure. We knew who you were all along. Soon after you first contacted us. Before you even received the first payment. You must have known that if the Americans found out, they would think you were ours all along. What were you going to tell them? You won seven million dollars playing bingo? You found it under your couch cushions?”

I stared at him with utter incomprehension.

“You should have spent it while you could, James. Your new salary will be little more than, let us say, a living wage.” He smiled thinly. “Think of me as a younger and more calorie-conscious version of Don Corleone. Now you have no choice but to become what they will have thought you were all along.”

He looked at me expectantly.

”I’m sorry,” I said, my voice barely louder than a whisper, beginning to wonder if he was confusing me with some other James Kowalski. “I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “Please. I am not fishing for confirmation. I know. Unless you expect us to believe that someone else was content to see all that money flow into a numbered bank accounts over which you personally have full and sole control.”

My head spun. “This is insane,” I croaked, as much to myself as to him.

“Really? It seems ordinary to me. Engineers everywhere make such transitions. From external consultant to internal employee. Yes, we were hoping for Dr. Sophie Warren, but Mr. James Kowalski is an acceptable consolation prize. You should be flattered.”

“Flattered,” I echoed, grasping at surreal straws. “By what exactly?”

“I would think our offer self-evident. You provide us technical assistance, and in exchange, we allow you to live. Think of it as a belated support contract for all that lovely technology you sold us.”

I stared bemused at Dmitri’s gap-toothed smile, my fear for my life half-erased by complete bewilderment. He wasn’t making any sense at all. I had not sold anyone any technology. I had never received any payments. I had no secret Swiss or Cayman Islands bank account -

– or did I?

Chapter 39

There was one possible way that Dmitri’s words might make a horrible kind of sense. Like a jigsaw puzzle that when assembled revealed a sanity-eating image straight out of H.P. Lovecraft.

To the best of my knowledge I had never opened an account at any Cayman Islands bank; but I had once signed a sheaf of papers to co-register a business there. Sophie had said our accountant had set it up for tax purposes, to receive payments from Convoy. Our lab was a complicated mix of university research and private enterprise, and the paperwork was always a nightmare. I had long ago given up on reading all our contracts in favour of just signing whatever she gave me. One of those signatures could easily have opened a bank account without my knowing it.

We had figured Sophie’s Axon neural networks had filtered to the drug cartels via Jesse and Anya’s Grassfire group. Now Dmitri was talking like I had sold it to them, and been richly rewarded.

The one way this all made sense was if they were both wrong; if Sophie had sold the drug gangs her technology herself, and funneled the money into a bank account she had opened for me.

She wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the proceeds, but then, she had never cared about money. What that bank account gave her was deniability. Everyone would think I had betrayed my girlfriend by selling the fruits of her genius behind her back.

It was unbelievable. But if true, it explained everything. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to tell me. Her tortured-soul, heavy-burden, trying-to-protect-you routine – all a lie. Our whole life together a betrayal.

But why? Why would Sophie have given her life’s work to a drug cartel? Or was it a drug cartel? I still didn’t even know where I was. All I knew was that I knew nothing.

I supposed that was at least a start. Better to begin at zero than a negative number.

“I’m still not sure I quite understand you,” I said carefully, “but since you say you already know everything, you won’t mind telling me what exactly that everything is.”

Dmitri looked annoyed. “James, had I any doubts, this man,” he nodded to the tattooed thug, “would take such pleasure in making you tell me anything I wanted.”

I managed to keep calm and stay quiet.

He sighed. “Fine. You made contact through your hacker friends. I attended some impressive demonstrations. They -“

“Which hacker friends?” I interrupted.

“Shadow and Octal.”

The names meant nothing to me. “Go on.”

“We came to an agreement. Money changed hands. You have been sending us the Axon source codes happily ever after, until we learned to our dismay that you were working with the DEA. Really, James, is there no honour among thieves?” He seemed genuinely darkly amused. “Although, to be fair, it might interest you to know that we seriously discussed abducting you and Dr. Warren last year. In the end we decided, why kidnap the goose when FedEx brings its golden eggs? But we should have seized the moment. And you. Backstabbing, like comedy, is all in the timing.”

“You found out the DEA were taking us to Colombia,” I said slowly. “So you decided to try to kill us there.”

“Nothing personal. Strictly business. We had the swarm designs, we decided it was time to consolidate our gains.”

“Kostopoulos was investigating you, and found out too much, so you killed him.”

Dmitri blinked, taken aback. “Who?”

“Michael Kostopoulos. The DEA agent you killed.”

The Russian man shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

The denial sounded genuine, and he had no apparent reason to lie, but who else could have assassinated Kostopoulos? I stared at Dmitri perplexed for a moment, then decided to table that issue. I had enough to worry and wonder about already. Such as: “If you were trying to kill us in Colombia, why not in Haiti?”

His expression flickered, and then he smiled sourly. “It was discussed. But the jewel in your crown, your swarm software, it didn’t fucking work, did it? So we decided to recruit your expertise. We were hoping for Dr. Warren. But you are better than nothing. You had better be better than nothing.” He leaned forward, intent, his voice low and oddly conspiratorial. “Because, James, if you cannot make the swarm software work, it will be difficult for me to defend to Mr. Ortega the business case for keeping you alive.”

I swallowed hard and wondered who Mr. Ortega was.

“But if you can solve that little problem,” Dmitri continued, leaning back again, “you could be very useful. It is difficult for us to recruit good engineers. We have all the best toys, all the money you could want, this is paradise for hackers, but people seem to have the impression that there are certain disadvantages to working for our organization. Lucky for you. It makes you too valuable to turn over to our faithful worshippers of Santisima Muerte.”

It all made a kind of awful sense. Sophie had sent them the newest version of her technology, the swarm software; but they hadn’t gotten the bug fix she had installed on Convoy’s UAVs. That was what they wanted from me, that and my ongoing expertise. In exchange, they wouldn’t torture me to death.

I wanted to know more about Mr. Ortega, but I didn’t want to admit my ignorance. If they discovered that I was not in fact the criminal mastermind they thought, they might decide I wasn’t worth keeping. So I took a shot in the dark: “How does Don Mario feel about all this?”

Dmitri looked at me narrowly. “What do you care?”

“Just curious.”

“Don Mario is not a subtle thinker. He pays Mr. Ortega very well for the services he provides, and is very happy with them.”

My mind raced. So Lisa’s speculation in Clark’s office had been halfway right. Don Mario, the dread Colombian drug lord, was indeed involved in this, but Ortega didn’t work for him directly.

I tried to temporize. “I can’t help you with the swarms.”

Dmitri’s face darkened, and he looked towards the loitering thug.

I quickly rationalized: “I’d need our lab’s latest test and development software. Without that there’s nothing I can do.”

“Your lab’s latest test and development software.” The Russian’s uneven teeth suddenly seemed predatory. “Such as that on a certain laptop recovered from the Ark Royale, for instance?”

I swallowed, defeated. “Yeah.”

“Good. Then you will do it.”

A hero might have said no, but I was no hero. I didn’t want to be taken to a torture chamber and carved up with a chainsaw. I didn’t want to die.

There was, however, something that I wanted almost more than life. I wanted to know how and why Sophie could have done this to me.

“All right,” I said quietly. “I’ll do it.”

Dmitri’s smile grew cheerful. “Don’t look so gloomy. It’s not so bad here. It has its advantages. This may sound mad now, but this time next year, you might even be glad this happened.”

I had my doubts.

Chapter 40

The compound where they kept me had once been a military academy, although its true purpose, according to Dmitri, had been to break the wills of fucked-up rich kids. That explained the fifteen-foot walls topped by rusting razor wire. They and the silence beyond made me feel like I was in some kind of postapocalyptic survivalist sanctuary. The surrounding landscape was endless and barren, rugged hills covered by cacti. In the distance a plume of volcanic smoke rose from the highest of a range of snow-capped mountains. The only signs of civilization anywhere were the sagging soccer goalposts just outside the walls and the thin ribbon of road stretching from the gate across that infinite wasteland. It felt like the end of the world.

The main building was U-shaped and three stories high. A collection of dusty SUVs sat in its cobblestoned courtyard. There had been some kind of statue there once, but only the plinth remained. The interior was as dreary as a derelict high school. Pipes and wires ran along tarnished walls, past cracked windows. Most of its rooms were empty.

About thirty people lived in the complex, rooming in what had once been student dorms. The communal bathrooms had seatless toilets and showers with no privacy. At least the hot water worked. The windows were barred, and my door was locked from outside at night. Most of my fellow residents were guards. When not patrolling the fence with lean and vicious-looking dogs, they played endless games of soccer outside. I didn’t interact with them, or anyone but Dmitri: he was the only other resident who spoke English.

It was hard to accept that my life had suddenly and irrevocably turned upside down. For the first few days my new existence felt essentially unreal, a temporary dream from which I would surely soon awaken. Of course I hadn’t really been kidnapped and forced into employment by vicious Mexican drug thugs. Of course I would be returning to Pasadena and Sophie in just a little while. Of course I wouldn’t be trapped in my host Ortega’s poisoned web for the rest of my life.

I supposed Ortega was a drug lord in his own right. Mexico’s drug cartels, the middlemen between Colombia and America, had been engaged in a savage and bloody war for years. But not for much longer. Now that Don Mario had drones to carry his cocaine directly to America, the Mexican cartels, though they might not know it yet, were as obsolete as dodo birds.

The services Ortega provides, Dmitri had said. Don Mario is not a subtle thinker.

I guessed Ortega had seen his own inevitable obsolescence and decided to jump ahead of the curve, to embrace new technology rather than fight it. He had understood just how disruptive Sophie’s drone technology was, and had acquired it in order to resell it, making drones and drone services available to the Colombians… and, presumably, anyone else willing to pay for them.

I hoped I was wrong. Because if I was right, if Ortega was a drug lord reinventing himself as the equivalent of IBM for criminals and insurgents, then he and Dmitri were even more dangerous than I had feared.

In a way it was brilliant. Assassination, drug smuggling, terror attacks: drones were the perfect weapon, decoupling the criminal from the crime. If you took only basic precautions, you never needed to fear arrest, the law would inevitably founder on reasonable doubt. Networked drones acting in concert were eight times more effective than individual UAVs at finding sunken treasure; they would likely be at least that much better at mayhem, violence, and destruction, too.

I could distract myself from my ongoing doom with work, at least, as long as I didn’t think too hard about its eventual consequences. There was plenty to do. Applying the swarm-system bug fix took only a few minutes per chip, but that was only the beginning of what they wanted.

“First we test your fix,” Dmitri explained to me in the server room that served as our office, once I had showered and changed into ill-fitting clothes. “And it better work.”

“It will.” I was confident of that much.

“But that fix will wipe out all of our training, won’t it?”

“Your training?”

“We’ve been teaching your Axons some new tricks.”

I nodded slowly. Sophie had been right: they had expanded on her work. Even I didn’t know how to do that. It was an astounding feat, comparable to figuring out how to fly a helicopter without any training. “We who?”

“Never mind. The point is, it will be necessary to erase that training, correct?”

“Yes.” Dmitri’s existing neural nets were like Neanderthals, an evolutionary dead end. I would have to devolve them back to what they had been before upgrading them to the more advanced Homo sapiens of Sophie’s swarm technology.

“Once you’re finished with the upgrade, they’ll be retrained again. Then we need to test them again, until we are sure our new tricks and your swarm technology play well together.”

“What kind of new training are we talking about?” I asked.

“Never mind.”

“I’ll need to know if I’m going to -“

“No, you won’t. We give you a series of tests. The training and testing will iterate until such tests are successful. That’s all you need to know.”

“Dmitri,” I said, risking humour and using his name for the first time, “I’m beginning to think that you don’t trust me.”

He gave me his toothy predatory grin. “James, I trust you like a brother. A psychopathic idiot savant brother who might turn on me at any time.”

It was almost funny. I almost smiled.

“I know you’re fantasizing about escape.” He waved off my protestations. “Of course you are. I know what you feel, because I felt it myself. I was not born working for Ortega. He drew me in like he did you. He’s a Venus flytrap, a pitcher plant, and you and I, we are little bugs. Take my advice and accept it. There is no escape, so enjoy the honey.”

I looked around the cramped server room, out the window at the razor wire and endless semidesert. “This is honey?”

“It will come. He believes in both the stick and the carrot. You will receive gifts. Liberties, even, eventually, but those only slowly. Ortega trusts no one. But you will have such luxuries to enjoy. Mansions, yachts, Ferraris. Women, not whores but beauty queens, the most beautiful in the world.”

“I don’t want -” I started bitterly, and then fell silent.

“I know. You are not that kind of man. Neither am I. You know why I am here? Not so long ago I was a free man, part of a group of hackers, the Darknet. Ortega hired us for a job. Or so it seemed. Then I met a woman. Her name was Dana. She was in trouble. Her former boyfriend was stalking her, and he was Russian Mafia.” A bad memory hardened his face. “I won’t trouble you with all the story. I could write a book, but no one would believe it. Things became crazy. Crazy. In the end I killed him. I had no choice. But then our lives were forfeit, we had to flee, and only Ortega would take us in. Only then did Dana admit the truth. He had forced her to create that situation. Not her fault any more than mine, or yours. He is like a spider. He catches you in his web, and after you thrash around a little while, amusing him, he devours you. But instead of killing you he makes you part of his web. As you have now become.”

“Like a von Neumann machine,” I mused. “Or grey goo.”

Dmitri blinked. “What are those?”

I looked at him, puzzled. He wasn’t much of a hacker if he didn’t recognize those references.

“Never mind,” he reconsidered before I answered, showing an equally unhackerlike lack of curiosity. “His web, it’s not so bad. We have more money than any university lab. I need equipment, or software, I don’t even ask the cost. In some ways it is paradise, a playground. It is difficult to find good assistants though.”

“So you kidnap them.”

He shrugged as if surely I could understand the necessity.

“Plus,” I said, “there’s that whole getting thrown in jail for the rest of your life worry.”

Dmitri laughed with genuine mirth, as if I had made a very good joke.

After a second I said, “Admittedly you’re putting a brave face on it… “

“James, being arrested is the very last thing we worry about. We own Mexico. Local police, federal police, special drug squads, even the military, they don’t take a shit without us knowing. This land we are on is theoretically owned by the Mexican military.”

I gaped. “You’re shitting me.”

“What frightens me is the other cartels, not the government. Last time a war broke out… ” Dmitri shook his head. “They are crazy here. Mexicans, they kill for fun, for nothing. They torture for pleasure, they leave garbage bags full of body parts on beaches, in the streets, to show off their work. Or they feed the dead to dogs. They worship death. I mean that literally. They have a saint they call Santisima Muerte, a skeleton in a veil. They dedicate black masses to her where they kill children and drink their blood as communion.”

I stared at him.

“It’s true. I have seen it.” His lips curled into his most customary expression, a twisted smile that said the only way to deal with life’s sick joke was to find it amusing. “Quite unhygienic, if you ask me, but then most sicarios don’t expect to live past thirty. Usually they get their wish. Then maybe someone writes a narco-corrido about them. There are hundreds of such songs, some very popular. Smugglers and sicarios are folk heroes here, like cowboys in America. Really, they should have their own reality shows. Narco-Corrido Idol. Mexico’s Next Top Sicario. People call Ortega a hero. Like some called John Glanton a hero.” I didn’t know that name. “But he swam a river of blood and climbed a mountain of corpses to be who he is. Never forget that.”

I couldn’t believe that a discussion of hit men and ritual cannibalism was actually relevant to my life. My new life. My old life was over, dead and buried forever, because my girlfriend had more or less sold me out to a group of drug-smuggling thugs and torturers who would keep me alive exactly as long as my engineering skills were useful. It was hard to comprehend, and almost impossible to internalize. Like being crippled by a car crash, or diagnosed with metastasized cancer; suddenly, in the space of a single day, the life I had spent years building and planning for had ended, replaced by desperate, grinding survival from one day to the next, unable to see more than a few weeks into a future now almost certain to end with an untimely death. All because of Sophie.

“The girl you got in trouble for,” I said. “Dana. What happened to her?”

“Oh,” Dmitri said, “we married.”

I looked at him.

“It wasn’t her fault. She had no choice,” he said uncomfortably. “We live in one of his mansions, on the ocean. It’s beautiful. You will see. When this is over, you will come visit us. Enough. Time presses. We must work.”

Chapter 41

The seminal genius Alan Turing invented the neural network back in 1948, though he called his crude sketch of several interconnected nodes an “unorganized machine.” Electrical signals were applied to some of these nodes, and flowed through the network like water. By changing the strength of the signal that could pass between any pair of nodes, like using valves to control how much water can flow through a pipe, you could, over time, train the system to produce a desired output from a given set of inputs. Turing didn’t know it, but it was the same fundamental design as the human brain.

Sixty-odd years later, the scale of Sophie’s neural networks would have blown Alan Turing’s mind. Her drone controllers had tens of millions of nodes, almost a thousandth as complex as a primate brain. Their inputs were things like GPS data, altimeter, pitch, yaw, camera view and communications signals; their outputs were aerial stability and the selection of an optimal direction.

But unlike traditional computer programming, where any particular action could be tracked back to a specific line of code, the inner workings of neural nets were opaque to human understanding. We could feed them inputs, and measure their outputs, but what happened in between was largely incomprehensible – a “black box”, in techie parlance. In one famous case a neural network had designed an electrical circuit that should not have worked, but somehow did. No one had ever figured out exactly how it had hacked the laws of physics. That scientific breakthrough lay buried forever in accessible in its black box.

Neural network research ground to a near-halt in the mid-nineties because they were painfully prone to both “undertraining”, which in our case would have led to crashed UAVs, and “overtraining”, meaning they worked beautifully in simulation but, like many human students, were totally unable to handle the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the real world. Progress since had been slow – until Sophie came along.

Maybe six people on the planet really understood her work, and I was not one of them. I had read her papers, gone line-by-line over the guts of the software harness used to train her neural nets, even listened to her explain at length, but I was never able to follow. I lacked the mental vocabulary. I wasn’t smart enough.

I was, however, smart enough to make use of her creations.

“Don’t worry,” Dmitri said, when we climbed to the roof of the abandoned school, and I faltered at the sight of six drones parked under an aluminum-framed tarpaulin. “They’re safetied.”

Meaning, I supposed, that the bombs they carried were prevented from detonation by some physical mechanism. But it wasn’t self-preservation that had made me hesitate. It was an idea exploding in my head.

The kill switch. The override sequence. The thirty-character kill-switch command would permanently disable any drone that received it; the override sequence, the secret Sophie had revealed to me when we were adrift in the Caribbean, would allow me to go one better and seize control over any of her neural nets. And Dmitri didn’t know that either existed.

I was trapped, but not helpless; imprisoned, but not without weapons.

“How many drones do you have, anyway?” I asked.

“Enough.” His tone of voice told me not to ask so many questions.

The initial work was straightforward enough. We removed the Axon chips from each drone, and I wiped them clean and rewrote them with Sophie’s latest, bug-fixed swarm configuration. Dmitri watched carefully, but I doubted he learned much: Sophie’s test-harness software was complex and user-hostile.

“You will teach me how to use that,” he said.

I didn’t have much choice but to agree.

Once the drones were upgraded we moved to the little hut that had been constructed atop the building’s roof. It served as a radio control tower. Cables ran to it from the several antennae jutting from the roof. En route I noted several satellite dishes on the building’s other wing, one of them VSAT, meaning a data connection, Internet access. If I could get online somehow, and send Jesse a distress signal…

Later, I told myself, as Dmitri booted the computer inside the control hut. I could plot later. First I needed to watch and learn.

“Packet radio?” I asked, as he opened a communications channel to the drones.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of encryption? DES?”

He laughed. “You think we’d use an American government algorithm? PGP, and a giant key. Slow but safe.”

He typed a password and established a packet-radio connection to all six drones, like a conference call. I plugged my laptop into the radio, accessed the open communications link, and paused.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Just figuring out what test to run first,” I said.

It was a lie. I had hesitated because I was at a nerve center of Ortega’s drone network, with an open channel at my fingertips. I could transmit Sophie’s kill switch and render all six of those drones catatonic, and Dmitri wouldn’t know until it was too late.

If I did, my next and final act would be a slow and painful death. It obviously wasn’t worth even considering it to eliminate only six drones. But if I could connect to all of Ortega’s UAVs, instead of just these six – via their built-in cell phones, for instance – then it would be within my power to permanently disable Ortega’s entire fleet.

At the cost of my own life.

I didn’t really think I was willing to make that sacrifice. But it would be nice to at least have the option available. At least then I wouldn’t feel quite so helpless.

“OK,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

Instead of sunken treasure, I had Dmitri send out a thug in a car with a cell phone, and instructed the drones to look for it. The sight of their insectile silhouettes soaring above us in search formation was unnerving, like a flock of giant monsters come to devour humanity. When they winged out of sight Dmitri called up a local terrain map to track them, which revealed to me me this derelict academy’s exact latitude and longitude.

Not that I could do anything with that information. Not yet.

The drones passed those initial tests with flying colours. When one spotted the target, they triangulated its location, swooped towards it, and then fanned out, spiralling outwards to cover as much nearby territory as possible, looking for more targets.

“Good,” Dmitri said thoughtfully, watching the expanding cluster of dots. “But we will be training them to do other things than search. I need you to prepare some new tests.”

“Like what?”

“Simple things first. Tunnel navigation. Coordinated simultaneous actions.” He paused. “Then, iterated target tests. We have lights that become darker when a drone comes near. We will set one up, and we want the swarm to send individual members towards it sequentially, until it is dark.”

I nodded, understanding his real intent. They wanted their killer swarms to send kamikazes at their targets one at a time, until thorough destruction had been achieved.

“Followed by penetration tests. A swarm will send one or more of members to switch off a light at the door of a tunnel, and then the entire remaining swarm should proceed through.”

They wanted to blow open a door or a wall, then send the rest of the swarm through the hole to destroy whatever the barrier had protected.

“Also,” he said, “cluster tests. The swarms must dispatch their drones to the densest populations of targets.”

I felt cold. It was all too obvious what that represented: killing the maximum possible number of people. “I don’t know how to do that,” I protested. “I can’t retrain them.”

“Yes, I know,” Dmitri said impatiently. “That will be done elsewhere.”

“Where? By who?” Could Sophie secretly be retraining her own neural nets for Ortega’s use? But no, that was crazy, it had to be someone else. Someone who had reverse-engineered her work well enough to use it for new purposes. A monumental task.

“Not your business. Your business is not to program them. It is to prepare and orchestrate such tests. You can do this? You will do this?” There was a dangerous edge to his voice.

I reluctantly agreed.

“I warn you we will be running equivalent tests in simulation. Any discontinuities between simulated and real results will be watchfully investigated.”

In other words, he would quickly discover any sabotage or slowdown on my part. I nodded my surrender.

“Good,” Dmitri said. “Begin.”

Chapter 42

The days that followed were surreal. There were moments when I took a mental step back, looked at myself, and marvelled: there I stood on the roof of a Mexican military academy turned drug lord’s R &D lab, watching a half-dozen UAVs swooping through the two sets of soccer goalposts which served as our test ‘tunnel’, or diving at fluorescent hockey-stick shaped lights erected by chain-smoking tattooed thugs. The Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime kept echoing through my head: “And you may ask yourself, how did I get here? And you may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?”

But you can get used to almost anything. I soon fell into something like a routine. I would program a test in the homegrown language Sophie and I had cobbled together over the years. Her test-harness software compiled that code into patterns her Axon neural nets understood, which we uploaded into the drones’ control chips, golden lozenges nestled in the fist-sized cradle connected to my laptop. They were no more intelligent than insects, but when I looked at them it was hard not to think of brains in jars, and Frankenstein, and Skynet from The Terminator.

That cradle had been hand-soldered by Dmitri himself; it looked crude and clumsy, but it worked. Like me, he was better with hardware than software. Once the electronic brains were reprogrammed, we put the drones through their new paces.

I had hoped I might get online, but after two days I still didn’t even know where the computers with Internet access were. They had to be somewhere: every morning Dmitri reprogrammed our drones with new software. He was nowhere near smart enough to reprogram Sophie’s neural nets himself. Someone else, some dark genius almost as smart as her, was teaching them new tricks, and every day they came closer to passing the tests.

Their purpose was obvious. These drones were being trained for military action. The initial target was presumably either a rival drug cartel or the Colombian government, but I feared Ortega intended to sell his technology to anyone with the money to buy it. Tyrants could use the cluster attacks on anti-government demonstrations. Terrorists could use the penetration attack to breach nuclear power plants. As for assassinations, we didn’t even need to run any new tests: Sophie’s existing heuristics were quite sufficient, as Michael Kostopoulos and the head of the DEA had already proved.

I wondered who had ordered that latter assassination. Don Mario? That didn’t make sense; why whack at the hornets’ nest of the US government unnecessarily, when you’re raking in money smuggling drugs with drones? Ortega seemed a more likely candidate. Not because he was threatened by the DEA. Quite the opposite. To show how much of a threat he was himself. If I was right, that attack had been his Big Brother ad, demonstrating that his drones could kill anyone, showing the criminal world he was open for business.

I had somehow become an integral part of a truly terrifying future. Who knew what monsters were already window-shopping Ortega’s wares, and what they intended to do with their drones, how many they intended to kill. I couldn’t just let that happen. I had to try to do something.

So on the third day I decided it was time to play a trick or two myself.

Chapter 43

Dmitri and I stood outside the control hut and watched the flock of UAVs circle overhead, like a cross between migrating pterodactyls and something from the far-future scenes in The Terminator. Their six engines buzzed like an insect hive. Beyond the complex’s walls, the hockey-stick light stood just outside one of the soccer goals. We were combining the bomb test and the penetration test.

A single drone detached itself from the circling swarm, plunged downwards, and zoomed past the light. As it flashed past, the light dimmed. A second drone followed, and it switched off. That was the signal the rest of the swarm was waiting for: they dove past the extinguished lamp, and through both sets of goalposts.

It was all too easy to imagine what would happen if these drones were armed and their targets were real. An aircraft carrier, for instance: the first drone blowing a hole in its side, the second enlarging it, and the remainder darting through that newly created aperture towards the vessel’s nuclear engine. Programming them for real-world battle would be easy. Pattern recognition was what neural networks were best at; switching their target patterns from “switched-off light” to “sufficiently large hole” was a matter of minutes.

“Perfect,” Dmitri said. “Now bring them back.”

I issued a come-home command. Nothing happened. The drones kept circling upwards and outwards, in larger and larger spirals.

“Bring them back,” Dmitri repeated.

I donned a puzzled expression. “I sent the command. They’re not responding.”

“What?”

I shrugged, retyped the command. There was no response. The UAVs’ orbits kept climbing and widening, ever higher and ever further away.

“Bring them back!” Dmitri ordered.

“Oh, shit.” I pretended to have just thought of something.

“What?”

“This happened once before,” I lied. “When they completed a test sequence they lapsed into survey mode and stopped responding to commands on their primary input.”

He stared at me. “You mean they’re out of control?”

“Looks like it.”

“What did you do last time?”

I shrugged. “Last time it was just one drone. Eventually it crash-landed about forty miles away. It wasn’t too bad, we just had to fix up one wing. But your drones have a bigger range, my guess is they’ll get about sixty miles away.”

Dmitri’s expression as he stared at me was a combination of rage, horror and suspicion. That last caused my bowels to loosen uneasily. If he discovered I had set this all up by surreptitiously adding a few new wrinkles to the end of the test sequence…

“We can’t lose these drones like that.” His voice was ice-cold. “If we do, I’m holding you responsible.”

I held up my hands in a not-my-fault way. “Nothing we can do but keep an eye on where they crash and hope your guys get to them first. Unless you can open some secondary communications link. They might still respond to that.”

Dmitri looked at the map. The dots of the swarm already described an arc with a two-mile radius. He chewed his lip uncertainly. For the first time since I had met him the situation was not completely in his control, and he suddenly seemed less like an alpha hyena, more like a nervous herd beast afraid to make a decision.

“We do have a secondary communications link,” he said slowly.

I peered at him for a moment, then nodded as if I too had just seen the solution. “The onboard cell phones.” Those drones soaring further away from us with every passing second were, quite literally, cell phones with wings; each had their own telephone number.

He took his wallet out of his back pocket, and produced an ordinary cell-phone SIM card. It went into a cellular modem connected to the control hut’s computer.

“How does it work?” I asked, as Dmitri typed a password, so rattled that he didn’t even hide it. I watched his fingers on the keyboard, memorized the characters. A victory – but a small one; it would be effective only in conjunction with that particular SIM card.

“Command-line. Very basic. Converts your SNP protocol into text messages.”

“Can you broadcast one-to-many?”

“Yes. You prefix the command with a list or regex of the drone IDs you want to contact. That goes to our gateway, and it sends the text messages.”

A window opened on the computer’s screen, empty but for a single › prompt. Dmitri typed: [87-92], then passed the keyboard to me.

“Bring them back,” he said harshly. “And don’t screw up.”

I stared at the blinking cursor and did nothing. The numbers he had just typed indicated that Ortega had at least 92 drones; but that wasn’t news. What had me frozen was that this was an opportunity to throw the kill switch, probably the best one I would ever get.

If I understood Dmitri correctly, this command line was an open interface to all of Ortega’s drones that were powered on and in cell phone coverage. From what I had seen, his drones were usually kept in standby mode, and cell coverage was increasingly ubiquitous around the globe. All I had to do was replace that [87-92] with the wild card [*], type the thirty-character kill-switch sequence, hit ENTER – and every single one of Ortega’s drones anywhere in the world would die. I could type very quickly. And maybe I could distract Dmitri somehow.

“Are you sure they’re in cell coverage?” I asked.

“We’re only seventy kilometres from Mexico City. They’ll fly into coverage soon enough if they’re not there already. Bring them back.”

I took a deep breath. Flicking the kill switch would save probably thousands of innocent lives, against which I could weigh only my own. It would be a far, far better thing to do than ever I had done.

But there might still be another way.

“Do it!” Dmitri demanded.

I closed my eyes, typed, and hit RETURN.

When I opened them again, the text of the come-home command I had issued glowed accusingly. I looked at the map. The dots on the screen were already heading back towards the mansion. They and I were safe.

“Good work,” Dmitri said, satisfied. “Well done.”

“Sure,” I muttered. “Thanks.”

Chapter 44

That night Dmitri barged into my room, where I was playing old video games on my laptop for want of any other way to spend my time, and said accusingly, “We were unable to replicate that flaw in simulation.”

I shrugged. “Simulation means nothing. There’s some real-world trigger.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You want to run that test again and see if it happens again?”

I didn’t mind if he called my bluff; I could blame wind patterns, flocks of birds, the angle of the sun, variations in the earth’s magnetic fields. The black-box nature of neural nets meant any such cause was theoretically possible, if extremely unlikely.

Dmitri frowned. “No. They are refining the training. We’ll test again tomorrow.”

And we did, at dawn. This time all the tests passed with flying colours, but Dmitri insisted on repeating them all again, and again, and again, with slight variations. We tested until after dark. When the men on the ground talked to Dmitri via walkie-talkie, I could hear the exhaustion and frustration in their Spanish. The vibe reminded me of a software company in the days before demonstrating their flagship product at a major convention. I wondered if maybe Mr. Ortega himself was going to come witness his drones in action.

I was tired too when they locked me back into my room, but I didn’t let myself sleep. Instead I went back to trying to pick my door lock with wires stolen from the server room. It had been many years since Jesse and I had experimented with locksmithing, and he had always been much better at it; but this was a lock to a Mexican dorm room, not a bank vault. It should have been easy. Yet when I finally gave up and went to bed it felt like I had made no progress at all.

Progress on other fronts was equally minimal. I still had no idea where I might find an Internet-enabled machine. Even if I did, it was password protected. The only good news was that I had learned exactly where I was.

When I had sabotaged the drone test, they had spiralled outwards in survey mode, automatically recording the input from their belly cameras. Later, when we backed up their flash memory for later analysis, I had managed to surreptitiously download a sampling of images onto my laptop. Those aerial photos showed me all the terrain for miles around.

The abandoned academy stood in the middle of a huge, fenced-off area surrounded on three sides by mountainous wasteland. The fourth was a steep-sided ravine not unlike the Arroyo Seco, my running route when I had lived in Pasadena, in my past life; and past that canyon was a vast concrete-and-tin shantytown. It went on for miles, to the very edge of the images the drones had captured, a conurbation of tiny, tightly packed buildings and winding dirt roads that collectively looked like some kind of living thing, a coral reef or a fungus.

No bridges crossed that ravine, and I wouldn’t have wanted to escape that way anyways. No gringo could hide in a shantytown like that. But I suspected it marked the very edge of metropolitan Mexico City, the world’s second largest city. Beyond stood civilization, and, hopefully, liberty and salvation.

But first I had to escape this razor-wired compound patrolled by armed guards and dogs. An almost insurmountable task – but not quite an impossible one, because I still had one trump card.

The override sequence.

Sophie had sent that secret key to my Hushmail account, which was backed up on the laptop Dmitri had recovered. Now that I had learned the password to the cellular network that linked Ortega’s drones, I might actually be able to seize control of them.

It was the nuclear option. If I succeeded, my options would immediately shrink to either escape or death, and even with six armed drones at my command, escape did not seem particularly likely. But it seemed possible. At the very least it seemed worth plotting. I wanted that hidden trump card in my hand even if I never dared to play it.

Dmitri was gone the whole next day, during which the guards were particularly watchful, and especially forbidding. I was not allowed onto the roof, or into the server room. I couldn’t even walk around outside without two men following me. My certainty that a visit from on high was imminent increased.

But I underestimated how fast, and how boldly, Ortega moved.

Dmitri returned the next day in a black Cadillac Escalade. I saw him from my window overlooking the courtyard. He didn’t walk back into the complex so much as strut. For the first time since we had met, he looked relaxed. He entered my room with a triumphant smile and a newspaper folded under his arm, which he gave me with a flourish. It was a copy of that day’s New York Times.

The front page’s huge emblazoned headline proclaimed Dozens Killed, Hundreds Injured in Terror Attacks Across Manhattan. Others announced A New And Deadly Weapon and Drug Cartels, Not Al-Qaeda, Believed Responsible.

I stared at it disbelievingly, as if he was trying to pass some theatrical prop off as the real thing. It took me long seconds to associate those screaming headlines with Dmitri’s broad smile, Ortega’s drones, and my own work.

When I finally did, it felt like I was falling from a great height, like the earth had opened up beneath me, like an abyss had swallowed me.

“Congratulations, James,” Dmitri said. “Now you are one of us forever.”

Chapter 45

According to the Times, six drones had been launched somewhere in New Jersey, and had reached Manhattan in minutes. Four attacked an outdoor concert in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, divebombing the densest parts of the panicked crowd. The other two had flown into the subway system and exploded simultaneously inside the stations at 116th and 110th Street, where the walls had compressed and intensified the bombs’ shockwaves. The overall death toll was expected to climb past 100.

I had helped to kill them. I had tested the software that had murdered more than a hundred people. Central Park had been a cluster attack, the subway a tunnel attack, exactly what I had trained those drones to do.

I put the newspaper down with shaking hands and stared dumbly up at Dmitri. One hundred dead. I thought of Oppenheimer’s famous quote: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Sophie was Dr. Frankenstein, I was the sorcerer’s apprentice, and the world was reaping the whirlwind we had sown. It had taken a hundred innocent lives already, and I already knew there would be many more to come.

“What you will not read in that newspaper, but is also true,” he said, “is that the Americans have learned that you have been working here with us.”

“What?” I could barely speak, these were too many shocks at once. “How?”

“We told them.”

“You… ” My voice trailed off.

Dmitri smiled. “They think they have a source in the fringes of our organization, but in truth, we have a voice in the heart of theirs.”

Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse, they got worse. Ortega had a mole somewhere high in American law enforcement. That explained how he had known Sophie and I were in Haiti.

“But why?” I looked back at the New York Times with growing horror. The reality of its catastrophic news was still only beginning to filter into my brain. “What possible reason? You just killed a hundred innocent people. For what?”

“Innocent of what exactly?” Dmitri asked, with his twisted smile. “It’s important you understand, James. This binds you to us forever. Even if we were to let you go tomorrow, the American will hunt you until death. They think of you as Ortega’s chief lieutenant, his technical genius.”

“You mean they think I’m you,” I muttered.

“Neither of us are geniuses. But that doesn’t matter. They will never believe your innocence. Do you understand? This is your life now. We are your people, now and forever. The sooner you accept this, the better.”

I didn’t answer.

“Come,” he said. “Let me show you.”

There was a TV in a room that opened onto the courtyard, the room where the keys to the vehicular fleet were kept, and where the guards hung out. I followed Dmitri there, shambling more than walking, my mind still reeling from the enormity, the insanity of the news. Manhattan attacked, a hundred dead, because of me.

I looked at the iron ring I wore on my little finger, a ceremonial prize given to all engineering graduates in Canada, built from the steel of a bridge that had collapsed, meant to remind us that lives might depend on the decisions we made. I hadn’t even forgotten that. I had known, and I hadn’t cared.

CNN’s anchorwoman sounded brittle and distraught. “Many viewers may find the footage we are about to display deeply disturbing. We feel it is our duty as a news organization to depict important news even when it may be traumatizing.”

After that warning, what they actually showed wasn’t that bad, obviously edited to remove onscreen violence and gore; but the images still stabbed through me like rapiers. Grainy cell-phone footage of a drone whizzing through a subway station. More professional shots of spindly drones wheeling over Central Park. Chaotic, shaky-camera footage of panicked New Yorkers in the park, and the sound of an explosion, followed by screams of pain and fear.

“Why?” I demanded again, my own voice quavering. “What possible reason -“

Dmitri shrugged. “Ask Ortega himself, if you like. Tomorrow he will be here.”

Chapter 46

I sat in my room and stared at nothing. I couldn’t stop thinking about New York. I tried to distract myself, tried to play video games with numb fingers, but moments later what had happened hit me again like an electrical shock, and I grunted as if struck by a hammer. I remembered walking through Central Park. I remembered standing in the 116th Street station with Sophie, after she had given a talk at Columbia University. I couldn’t help but envision the drones soaring down the subway tunnel, and diving into the densest crowds of humanity in the park. My ears replayed those awful screams I had heard on CNN again and again.

That night I knocked on my door until one of the guards on patrol let me out, and convinced him to take me by Dmitri by the simple expedient of repeating the Russian man’s name.

Dmitri’s room was much like mine, but almost pathologically clean. He answered his door dressed in underwear and a MONSTER 666 T-shirt. It was a popular brand in Mexico, at least among drug cartels; the stack of threadbare clothes they had brought me included two such shirts.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

He nodded curtly, dismissed the guard in Spanish, motioned me in. The room had been built for double occupancy: two beds faced each other across a narrow central corridor. We each sat on one. Dmitri took a swig from a half-full bottle, passed it to me. It was vodka. He was already half-drunk, in an overly controlled way.

“What is it?” he demanded.

I took a deep breath. It was time to feign Stockholm syndrome, and hopefully earn some trust. What I was about to do seemed like high folly, like discarding a trump card – but then, I had already proven that I wasn’t willing to play it. And a hundred innocent people had already paid the price for that cowardice.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “About what you said. Me accepting being here for life. I decided, there’s something I should tell you.”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s a kill switch. A command that will disable any of your drones.”

He didn’t look surprised. “Yes. We were wondering.”

“Whether it existed?”

“If you would tell us.”

I nodded slowly. “Well, I’ll tell you what it is. You’ll want to blacklist it from your network, filter it out before it reaches the drones.”

Dmitri smiled in a superior way. “No need.”

I was flabbergasted. “You already knew it?” Only Sophie and I had known the kill-switch syntax. If they knew, then she had told them, which in turn meant that she was the one secretly retraining their drones -

“No,” he said, shattering that particular theory. “We’ve whitelisted the network. Only a fixed subset of commands are allowed through. Everything else is filtered out.”

Like a cell network that only allowed full and proper words in text messages. I opened my mouth and closed it again. That meant the override sequence, my last hope, would likewise be eaten by their radio network before it ever reached the drones. Dmitri was right. There was no escape.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Our secret friends among the Americans.”

I noted his use of the plural. Every time I thought it couldn’t get worse. I consoled myself that at least the deaths in New York were less my fault than I had thought; if I had tried to trigger the defanged kill switch when I had the chance, I would only have condemned myself to death for nothing.

“I’m glad you told us, James. I’m glad to see you are beginning to understand your situation.” Dmitri’s voice was strangely avuncular. “You will soon see that there are certain advantages. Over time we will expand your liberties. Think of this as a probationary period.”

“Right,” I said. “It’s just another job.”

“Exactly.” He remembered something amusing, and his twisted smile reappeared. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. A little tidbit you might appreciate. Do you know how we trained the Axons for New York? We used a copy of Gangs of Gotham‘s virtual world.”

I shook my head, amazed and appalled. Gangs of Gotham was a massively multiplayer online game set in an exact virtual reproduction of New York City, down to individual buildings and trees. They had connected that simulated world to the neural networks’ visual inputs and taught them what routes to take, how to recognize their target territory. They had used a video game to help kill real people.

“It doesn’t even bother you?” I asked. “All those people dead?”

“Of course it bothers me. If the decision had been mine we would have struck Washington, not New York.”

I blinked. “Why Washington?”

“Because it is the capital of America, and America is a tumour on the earth,” he said with unexpected passion. “It devours art and beauty and culture and shits advertising and shopping malls. It rapes the earth, and the poor, and grows fat from their blood. Its people are drugged to keep them fat and quiet, jailed for the drugs they want, and charged their souls for ones they need. America is all the worst impulses of man given flesh, and its proudest hope is to turn all the rest of the world into little Americas. I am sorry that people died, James. Truly. But the United States is a cancer on the planet that needs to be eradicated, by whatever means necessary.”

“Jeez,” I said inadequately, awed by his hatred and eloquence.

He looked embarrassed, as if he knew he had said too much. “It’s late. I’m tired. Dana and Ortega are coming tomorrow. Is there anything else?”

“No,” I said.

The security guard escorted me back to my room. I waited for his footsteps to vanish away. Then I resumed work on my door. And after another hour of frustrating concentration and maddening near-misses, I finally popped open its lock.

I stared at my newly unlocked door for minutes. I knew I shouldn’t go out, or my ability to escape might be discovered before I could make any use of it. I obviously wasn’t going to escape the compound and cross the surrounding wasteland that night. But visions of the New York attacks still besieged my mind. I needed to get out, if only for a time. And maybe, just maybe, I could find a computer connected to the Internet.

I opened the door, stuck my head out into the darkness outside, listened, and heard nothing but my own breath; so I went for a walk.

The door clicked quietly shut behind me, and my socks were silent on the tiled floors. There was barely enough ambient light to make out the hallway walls. I felt like I was in a video game, a first-person shooter like House of the Dead, and rotting zombies might leap out at me at any moment.

I headed for the stairs, planning to investigate the room directly beneath the VSAT dish on the roof. The stairwell was lit by a single bulb on the top floor. As I closed its door behind me, another one opened above, and footsteps began to clomp downwards. A guard on patrol.

The sudden wave of fear was like being doused by ice. I froze, my breath strangling in my throat. I didn’t dare double back; he might hear. So I fled down to the basement as quietly as possible, fighting to keep control of my hammering heart and panicked limbs, and hid in the crawlspace beneath the lowest stairs.

The footsteps descended. I waited, held my breath, and prayed. I was aware of every whisper of air, the smell of mold and rust, the dim light bleeding from around the steel door that led into the basement. I flashed to the scene in Misery where the crazy nurse shattered the protagonist’s ankles with a sledgehammer because he had attempted to escape.

The ground-floor door opened. The footsteps dissipated away.

Slowly I allowed myself to breathe again. I wanted to flee back to my room, but decided I couldn’t be dissuaded by a single near-miss, however harrowing – and I was curious why they kept the lights on in the basement, when the halls above were dark.

Beyond the unlocked steel door was a hallway with unfinished walls, lit by a bulb dangling from naked wire, extending about twenty feet to another door. There were no sounds and no sign of habitation. I advanced cautiously, silently. It felt like exploring a cave. The other door was partially open already. I edged forward until I could look through to the shadowed room beyond, empty except for a small wooden table, a stained mattress on a steel frame, and another naked light bulb.

I slipped into it, trying not to touch anything, as if someone might dust for fingerprints. The chamber was damp and windowless, redolent with a strange organic smell. Four sets of handcuffs hung from the corners of the frame, and two metal hoops projected from the concrete wall behind the door. Like the mattress, the wall beneath those hoops was darkly stained.

I took a reflexive step back, trod on something sharp, pulled my foot away instinctively. Then I crouched to see what I had stepped on.

It wasn’t a pebble. It was a fragment of bone.

The room was warm, but I began to shiver. The stains were blood. The bone was human. This was a torture chamber. I remembered what Dmitri had said: garbage bags full of body parts, rivers of blood, mountains of corpses. How many men and women had died in this horrific cell? I didn’t want to know. There were a multitude of stains. I could almost hear their screams. No wonder Dmitri could treat a hundred American deaths so casually.

It was all too easy to see myself chained to that bed for some transgression. A failed escape attempt. Or simply because I was no longer useful. I couldn’t help but imagine one of Ortega’s thugs standing over me, holding a knife, or a blowtorch. Wire cutters. A chainsaw. They worship death. They torture for pleasure.

A folded piece of paper rested on the little wooden table, spattered by some dark liquid. I opened it and read:

• Who was his source at the border?

• Were union representatives involved?

• What did K. know about Ramirez?

• Who else knows or might suspect?

It was written in big, flowery handwriting that seemed almost feminine, jarringly out of place in that chamber of horrors. And why in English? Had the victim been American? I imagined him – or her – strapped to the bed. I imagined being chained there myself, with torturers standing over me, tools of blood and agony in their hands.

It was too much, the image was too terrifying. I put back the note, abandoned my exploration, fled back to my room, locked my door behind me. Somewhere outside an enraged dog kept barking. They feed the dead to dogs. When I finally found sleep it was full of blood-soaked nightmares.

The drug lord arrived at dawn.

Chapter 47

A small fleet of armoured SUVs brought Jorge Ortega to our humble abode. We met him outside, at the gate. He was shorter and rounder than I had expected; not fat, but wide and compact, with a smooth round face and thin lips. Despite his diminutive stature he radiated so much sheer presence that it was hard to tear my eyes away. Maybe it was knowing that he could have me killed with a wave of his hand, but whatever the reason, he seemed more there, more alive, than anybody else I had ever met, as if he were the Ur-man and the rest of the world only a figment of his imagination.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said politely, shaking my hand. His English was faintly accented, more British than American. He was extremely soft-spoken. He didn’t need to speak up. The instant he opened his mouth, everyone in earshot shut the hell up.

“You too,” I lied.

Nearby, Dmitri and Dana embraced, and seemed genuinely delighted to see each other. She was a pretty woman with dark hair and a runner’s build, dressed all in black but for her visually dissonant pink-and-brown teddy-bear backpack.

“Come,” Ortega said, “let us walk.”

He set a fast pace around the outside of the fence, clearly a man who liked to be in motion. We followed. Above us the drones began to circle. Ortega had asked to see them put through their paces.

“I never thought they would live up to their claims,” Ortega said. “An individual vehicle following a signal, that made sense. But a whole flock, talking to each other, using collective tactics, I’m still amazed. Your swarm technology,” he said to me, “it will change the world.”

“It’s not really mine.”

“But you gave it to us. You’re our Prometheus.”

“Careful with that match,” I said without thinking.

He stared at me, looked affronted. For a horrible second I thought he would order me flayed with a potato peeler.

Then he chuckled. Even his laughter was scary. “On the contrary, Mr. Kowalski. When no one else has fire, your light must burn as brightly as it can.”

I figured if I’d made him laugh I probably wasn’t about to die, and pushed my luck a tiny bit. “So that your customers can find you?”

He looked at me, then at Dmitri, sharply. It was all the confirmation I needed. Dmitri looked scared, shook his head.

“Logical conclusion,” I explained, a little triumphant. I knew it was insane to be talking like this but I couldn’t stop myself, I felt giddy. “Why else would you do this?”

“Yes,” Ortega admitted. “New York was my first commercial.”

“Your first?”

“Do you box, Mr. Kowalski?” I shook my head. “A one-two punch is ten times more effective than a single jab. America knows this well. Ask Nagasaki.”

I stared at him.

“Especially if it goes unanswered. And it will. America’s fear makes them weak. Who do you think will volunteer to head the DEA now? I believe that position will remain vacant for a long time. America’s politicians scream they will never talk to us, but that was before they understood that they too are vulnerable. Personally vulnerable. They will negotiate now. Not directly, no. But they will allow the governments in Mexico and Colombia to settle. Do you even know there are wars going on, here and there? Undeclared, but wars. In Mexico five thousand die every year.” I thought of the torture chamber I had discovered. This urbane, well-spoken man had ordered those deaths, and the slaughter in New York. “We will have a truce. But first we must have Nagasaki.”

I licked my lips. My mouth was dry. He might even be right: a second attack, proof of his impunity, might transform knee-jerk rage into terrified realpolitik. Both the American government and its people might decide in a hurry that the War On Drugs wasn’t really worth fighting if the other side could shoot back.

“Nagasaki where?” I asked.

To my surprise he answered. “Far away. Showing our reach. The second most hated nation on Earth, after America, is the empire that preceded it. There is a G8 meeting next week in London.” Ortega smiled. “I can promise you it will be an explosive event.”

I stared at him, astonished, overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the notion. It was one thing to hear Sophie and Jesse and Anya talk about how armed drones and especially swarms were unstoppable, could kill anyone. It was another entirely to talk to someone who apparently actually intended to use them to assassinate the leaders of the eight wealthiest nations on the planet.

It was possible, in that his drones really were unstoppable and he might well succeed, but it was also insane. It would make him an international pariah on the scale of Osama bin Laden.He would never be able to hide in Mexico, or anywhere else.

“Why?” I asked.

He considered his words. “To usher in a new era.”

“What era?”

“Mine.”

I forced myself to nod politely. He seemed so quiet and courteous, but he had killed his way to preeminence in Mexico’s drug underworld, arguably the most brutal and violent society on the planet. Was he actually crazy, megalomaniacal, in a flawed-brain-chemistry way? Was I talking to a functional madman? It seemed the most likely explanation – and the most frightening one. Who knew what a madman would do, or what trivial act might provoke his wrath?

“Until then we must tighten security,” Ortega continued. “I’ll be stationing more men here to watch the property.”

His look at me, and then Dmitri, walking hand in hand with Dana. His meaning was clear: and to watch you.

“No problem,” Dmitri said.

“Dana will come back with me tomorrow.”

At that the Russian lovers paled. “You said she could stay,” Dmitri protested. “You said she could stay here from now on -“

“No. Tomorrow she returns.” Ortega sounded like a teacher correcting an error of fact. “I will not risk any lapses or distractions until your work is done.”

Dmitri nodded sullenly, like a scolded schoolboy.

“What else do we need to do?” I had thought we were finished the testing.

My question was apparently beneath Ortega’s notice. It was Dmitri who eventually answered, low-voiced: “We need to test multiple swarms working in concert.”

We walked onwards. My mind reeled. Sophie had given deadly next-generation technology to a megalomaniacal psychopath, who was planning to use it to kill the leaders of the free world – with my help – and there was nothing I could do. Any attempt at sabotage, to delay their readiness past the G8 meeting, would be futile and suicidal. They were already more or less ready, and Dmitri had learned enough that they no longer really needed my expertise.

My trump cards, the kill switch and Sophie’s secret override, were both useless thanks to Dmitri’s network filters. I had no cards to play at all, now, only the hope that they wouldn’t execute me now that I knew too much and was no longer useful except in a generic skilled-engineer way.

As we passed the goalposts, the six drones howled through them. The tunnel test.

“How do they keep their formation?” Ortega asked.

Dmitri looked at me, and I realized I was the expert.

“Mostly just by sight,” I said hollowly. “Like birds or insects, a few very simple rules can lead to quite complex swarm behaviour. But they can communicate with each other, too, to report sightings, and to make collective decisions.”

“You mean they think? They have a language?”

I shrugged. “They’re not about to write you any sonnets. Do honeybees think? They’re about that smart. It’s not really a language, just a basic radio protocol. Like, on the penetration test, when they’re near the door, they’ll all quickly transmit to each other how well-placed they are, and then the one with the highest rating will say ‘OK, it’s me, I’ll open it.’”

“What if the frequency is jammed?”

I looked at Dmitri; this was his specialty.

“It’s military-strength technology,” the Russian said, “they’ll automatically cycle through multiple frequencies, you’d have to jam the whole spectrum.”

“But if it was? If they couldn’t communicate?”

Dmitri looked to me.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “We haven’t tested that. My suspicion is that on a penetration run you might have two or even three go down independently to open the door before the others realized what was going on. But probably not the whole swarm.”

Ortega nodded. “That’s acceptable. But let’s test them with their radios off. And what if someone else sends radio signals pretending to be part of the swarm? Like an animal mimicking birdsong.”

I was beginning to realize that Jorge Ortega was very intelligent indeed.

“It’s encrypted packet radio,” I said. “New keys are generated every time a swarm forms. Basically every mission. They’d have to break the encryption between launch and completion. And even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do much with it. Much easier just to break into your control channel and signal them to abort.”

Ortega nodded, satisfied.

I realized something and opened my mouth to correct my second last sentence. The swarm network that drones used to talk to each other was like walkie-talkie communications directly between phones, with no cell tower involved. But while it was generally only used to fine-tune the drones’ actions while in flight, Sophie had designed it so that you could, at least theoretically, also use it to send control signals.

When the ramifications of that began to hit me, I shut my mouth.

“What is it?” Ortega asked, watching me hawklike.

“Just thinking about how long it would take to break the codes,” I lied. “Probably half an hour even with a supercomputer. Depends on the size of your keys.”

“Our network is secure enough,” Dmitri said sharply. “I can guarantee that.”

I didn’t really care. His packet radio network, the encrypted control channel, its whitelist that filtered out the kill switch and override code – all that would be rendered completely irrelevant if I could bypass it, by using the test harness to hack my way into the short-term, short-distance swarm network. Then I could knock them out with the kill switch.

Or seize control with the override.

“Hey,” I said, “these test drones, they’re not armed, right? Because if we send out a silenced swarm without even simulation testing, I mean, it’ll probably be fine, but technically we can’t be absolutely sure what they’ll do -“

This wasn’t really true, but I didn’t want them wondering why I was asking.

“Of course they’re armed,” Dmitri said absently. “In case this facility is attacked. But don’t worry. They’re hardware safetied. Even if they run amok they won’t blow up.”

“Good,” I said. “Glad to hear it.”

But I was thinking: Wanna bet?

Chapter 48

Ortega, Dana, and his dozen bodyguards left the next day, after the radios-off test, which went better than I had expected; the swarm sent only two drones to switch off the light, and the other half swooped through the soccer tunnel sequentially rather than all at once. It creeped me out to watch them setting their own courses and making decisions with apparent intelligence. I knew it was an illusion, they were no smarter than ants or bees, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen in another decade or two, when their descendants became as smart as rats. It brought to mind science fiction tales of robot armageddons and deals with AI demons.

Those speculative worries helped displace my fear of the here and now, but only a little. I had been through more gut-twisting terror in the last few weeks than I had ever expected to face in a lifetime – the Colombian jungle, the Haitian pirate attack, my abduction – and had maybe gotten a little better at handling it; but those situations had been forced on me, I had had no choice but to react. There in Ortega’s compound I had the option to do nothing, and stay apparently safe.

It was so tempting to do nothing, or at least nothing so precipitous. When in doubt, don’t, whispered the soft and cowardly voice of reason. Just wait one more day. Maybe everything will change tomorrow. Maybe you won’t have to do anything.

But late that night I sat in my dorm-room cell, staring intently at my laptop, cycling through my illicitly downloaded aerial photos of this territory, plotting my escape. Just in case, I told myself. It was always best to be prepared.

It was thirty kilometres from the compound gate to the edge of the vast fenced area around us. Military territory, according to Dmitri. The one road cut straight across the wild, cactus-strewn semidesert except where it bent around a steep ridge. There were buildings, presumably guardhouses, where it met the fence.

I was all too aware that the plan fermenting in my mind was utterly insane. Ortega had increased security. It was me alone against dozens of armed and trained men, maybe a hundred if you included those at the second gate. I didn’t even want to count the number of ways in which things could go terribly wrong.

But then, things had gone terribly wrong already, and would inevitably get worse yet. Even if I quailed and did nothing, my life was not exactly on course for an extended span of years. I knew the walls of my gilded cage would close in on me soon enough. There was no sense in jumping into definite suicide, but it wouldn’t hurt to be ready. Just in case I needed it. Just in case I woke up one day feeling brave and crazy.

It took me six hours to write the program that might save both myself and the leaders of the Western world. The plan was simple enough. I would slip out and arm the drones’ explosive payloads, seize control of them, and use them to mount a sneak attack on up the compound gate. In the subsequent confusion I would steal a car and drive away like a bat out of hell on speed. The remaining drones would clear my road to Mexico City and safety. From there I would somehow warn the world.

It was a desperate and unlikely plan, and like most such, it did not long survive contact with reality.

Chapter 49

I did not intend to escape when I picked my lock and slipped out from my bedroom late the next night. My plan was only to sneak down to the drones, open them, and see if I could arm the explosives. Part of me hoped it would be impossible. Then I would have no choice but to spend the rest of my life as one of Ortega’s pet engineers, working feverishly to prove my continued usefulness, dreading the day I became surplus to requirements.

The compound was eerily silent. I made it to the server room, liberated its toolbox, and made my way down the former academy’s barren halls to the stairway that led to the roof. The nights here were cold, and I shivered as I emerged into the open air, where air-conditioning ducts extruded like metal fungi from the gravelled roof.

I winced as I walked; socks and gravel were a painful combination. Above me a half-moon glittered brilliantly amid countless stars. The drones lay in a neat row beneath the tarpaulin that protected them from rain and prying satellite eyes, near the giant’s crossbow that was their launcher. The catch-net had been rolled up, and the control hut was locked.

I crouched beside the nearest UAV and examined the three panelled compartments in its body. Avionics, fuel cell – and payload: ten kilograms of devastatingly powerful high explosive. I knew accidental detonation was impossible, only a massive current spike through the blasting cap could set it off; but my hands trembled, and not only from the cold, as I unfastened the panel with a Phillips screwdriver.

Its door yawned open, revealing a compartment full of a waxy substance that looked like Play-Doh, a congealed clump of matter that could destroy everything in a thirty-foot radius. A single bullet-shaped probe had been thrust into the glutinous mass: the blasting cap. Two wires protruded from it. The red one was affixed to one of two connection points on the compartment’s inner wall. The black wire was tied off in a knot.

The solution was almost absurdly obvious; all I had to do to arm the drone was clip the black wire to the free connection point. I supposed simple was sensible. They had to be able to act quickly in case the compound came under attack.

I had written my escape program; I knew how to arm the drones; all I had to do was upload the program to the drones’ neural nets, launch them, and steal a car. But I had no intention of doing so that night. It was far too soon. I hadn’t thought out all the possible risks and ramifications. Everything had to be perfect before I dared to act. I closed the drone’s payload compartment, picked up the toolbox, and stood, ready to return to my bed for hours of what I already knew would be tense sleeplessness.

A harsh voice called out to me in Spanish, and I gasped involuntarily.

The guard approached, one hand on his slung Kalashnikov, his eyes hard and suspicious. I felt my heart convulsing in my chest like a dying fish. It was already too late to try to talk my way out; my body language had revealed my guilt.

I didn’t understand Spanish, but his gesticulations made his words unnecessary: I was to come with him, right now. The name “Dmitri” was audible in the accusatory babble.

I felt physically numb as I led the way back along the roof. The game was up. I was very possibly walking to my own death. Escape was now out of the question; the very best case was that henceforth Dmitri would have me watched like a hawk. This had been my one chance, and I had squandered it.

I was so distracted by fear and dismay that I tripped over an air-conditioning pipe, and the toolbox flew from my hands and fell open, spilling equipment onto the gravel. I knelt automatically, started recovering the fallen tools with fumbling fingers. The guard said something exasperated and began to help. It must have been so obvious from my trembling limbs that I was not in any way a threat.

What I did next was more instinct than intellect. My fingers closed on the shaft of the fallen hammer. I rose to one knee for better leverage. And as the guard turned towards me, sudden surprise etched on his face, I swung with all my strength.

It wasn’t much, my muscles were clenched tight, but my pure animal desperation was enough that the steel hammer struck his temple with a clearly audible thunk, and he collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

I stared down at him for long seconds, still on one knee, hyperventilating from the adrenalin, almost waiting for him to wake up and grab his gun and shoot me. Blood welled slowly from his head onto the gravel. I couldn’t remember the last time I had struck another human being. Junior high, probably.

I put my fingers to his throat like a TV detective, felt a faint fluttering. I knew intellectually that now now the die was irrevocably cast I had to kill him. There was an Xacto knife in the toolbox. But I couldn’t bring myself to use it; instead I dragged him out of sight behind the control hut, bound his wrists and ankles with wire, and gagged him with his shirt, watching my fingers and arms do the work as if they were operating autonomously. It was like my sense of self had retreated into an observation capsule behind my eyes, abandoning all motor control to my reptile brain.

Fortunately my reptile brain had watched a lot of action movies and seemed to know just what to do. There was no choice left, it was escape or die, and dawn was only a few hours away. I hid the gun under some ductwork and hustled back to the drones, hyperaware, every sense on overload. Every creak of a window dangling open in the wind was a battalion of guards come to shoot me dead.

After harvesting the golden Axon chips from the UAVs I fled as quickly and silently as I could. Then while crossing the roof I tripped again and dropped them. For a frantic moment I feared three were lost, before I found them unharmed between my feet.

The building was as quiet as a mausoleum. I descended to the lab, plugged the electronic brains into their cradles, and uploaded my escape program. Half an hour after clubbing the guard with the hammer I was back on the roof. En route I checked on him briefly; still alive, still unconscious. It took only five minutes to plug the neural networks back into the drones they commanded.

When finished I took one step back towards the stairs and found myself staring straight into the startled and suspicious expression of another armed guard. He was ten feet away, he had one hand on his gun already, and he was big and strong. His presence seemed inexplicable, the work of a cruel and capricious god.

Chapter 50

I was so wired and adrenalinized that I felt like a wild animal. I didn’t even hesitate. “Come on,” I said before he could initiate the conversation, keeping my voice brisk and casual, “give me a hand here.”

He said something interrogatory in Spanish, but with a faint note of uncertainty in his voice.

“Aidez-moi,” I said, hoping that French was more like Spanish. “Test. Examination. Night test. Testo de noche. Come on.” I walked to the nearest drone, grabbed one wing, and nodded to the other. “Take that. Prends-le.”

He hesitated for a very long second.

“Come on,” I said, letting some of my emotion and frustration bubble into my voice. “You want to go wake up Dmitri? Il dorme. He’s tired. Es muy fatigo. But fine, wake him up.” I motioned to the stairwell as if his funeral, not mine, lay in that direction.

After a second the guard grunted, reslung his gun, walked slowly over to the drone, took the other wing, and helped me carry it to the launcher. Without allowing myself to hesitate I started its engine and fired it into the sky. The launcher, like the drones themselves, was sleeker and better-made than the one Jesse and Anya used; thankfully, this meant it was quieter, too.

“Hurry,” I said, rushing back to grab the second drone and launch it before the first one could tell itself to go blow things up. “Vite! Pronto!”

My desperation was contagious. The guard and I sprinted back and forth, launching the drones one at a time, until all six had spiralled upwards into the night sky. Then he looked at me quizzically, as if wondering what we did next. I ignored him, walked to the edge of the roof where I had a view of the gate, and waited.

Seconds ticked by. Nothing happened. It hadn’t worked. There was a bug in my program, or I had mistranscribed the override sequence, or there had been some other obstacle I had failed to notice or surmount. I was an idiot. I had had my chance, and I blew it, and I deserved what happened next.

A single sound separated itself from the faint engine whine above us. A drone caterwauling downwards, dopplering towards the earth. I flashed back to the mortar attack in Colombia, and quickly dropped to my knees so that the edge of the roof obscured my view of the gate.

Then a flash like a blinding instant of daylight lit up the world, and a colossal whoooom! blew out every window in the compound and slammed me flat.

If anything I had underestimated the destructive capacity of ten kilograms of military-grade high explosive. I was a good fifty metres away, and in the building’s blast shadow, but I felt like I had been knocked over by a giant bowling ball. My ears rang and spots flickered in my eyes as I climbed back to bipedality. Near me the guard staggered to his feet. He had felt the full force of the blast, and was far too dazed and rattled to think of me as he stared dumbfounded at the field of devastation below. When I shoved him off the edge of the building he didn’t even scream.

I wondered if I had just killed a man. It was only three stories, I reassured myself frantically, still somewhat in shock myself. Enough to break a few bones but probably not kill him. And even if I had, he was one of Ortega’s drug thugs, why should I care? I had bigger things to worry about.

I tried to run for the stairs but had to settle for a kind of dazed halting stagger that felt like wading through mud. Lights were coming on all around the compound. I stumbled downstairs and found commotion everywhere. Two more guards raced past, ignoring me. I realized they were no more ready for this than I was. Even if they had heard the drones launch, they probably hadn’t connected them to the explosion, I doubted the thugs even knew they had bombs on board. They probably thought a rival drug cartel or the Mexican military was attacking from outside.

When I reached the courtyard I halted in amazement. I had hoped the blast might punch a hole into the sliding metal gate. Instead it had been blown entirely free of the fence. Mangled fragments of various size lay still red-hot and smoking on the asphalt. The place where the gate had stood was a pulverized crater several inches deep surrounded by radial lines etched into the ground like a child’s drawing of the sun. Broken glass was everywhere. The heat was intense, like standing next to a fire.

A dozen armed men were busy assembling outside this breach in the walls, awaiting a wave of attackers, while others rushed to vantage points and shouted to each other, searching the darkness for the nonexistent invaders. Nobody even looked my way as I liberated the keys to a Cadillac Escalade. Its hood was dented and blistered from the explosion, its windshield was a Jackson Pollock painting of spiderwebbed cracks pockmarked with open holes, but when I turned the key its engine roared to life.

I offered a brief prayer of thanks to Young Drivers of Canada for teaching me how to drive a stick shift, and another to Lady Luck for allowing one headlight to survive. I hoped the men with guns would be too surprised to shoot at me. I hoped this Escalade was bulletproof, and its tires solid rubber. I hoped the drones didn’t mistake it for a target.

“If ‘twere done when ‘twere done, then ‘twere well ‘twere done now,” I muttered, and put the Cadillac in gear.

When I shifted into second it shuddered, nearly stalled, but didn’t quite. I rattled across the courtyard and over the crater, swerving around the searing shards of twisted metal, squinting through the windshield’s abstract art as I went offroad around the largest chunk of debris, remembering Zavier, trying to ape his cool control as I bumped my way back onto the scarred asphalt and changed into third gear.

The physical mechanics of the escape took all of my attention, it was like being immersed in a video game. It wasn’t until I was in fourth gear and I glanced up to see the compound dwindling in the rearview mirror, cubist through the cracked glass, that I realized its guards hadn’t fired a single shot.

In fifth gear the engine made a horrible grinding sound and I quickly shifted back to fourth. Something important must have been jarred loose by the explosion.

I hoped for a few minutes that they might not even pursue me. But that dream was quickly dashed.

Chapter 51

In the rearview mirror I saw two sets of headlights coming up behind me, moving fast. Trapped in fourth gear all I could do was watch, my throat clogged with helpless fear, as they closed. Strobelike lights began to flicker from both pursuing cars. It wasn’t until the bullets began to thwack dully into the Escalade that I realized it was gunfire.

I started with the realization, crouched down as far as I could. The wheels slewed off the road and only a reflex twist of my hands brought me back before I went into the boulders and cacti. I had to straighten up to see the road. I felt like I was sticking my head out of a foxhole during an artillery assault, but I did it. Then I realized that the bullets weren’t penetrating. Stealing an escape vehicle from a drug lord’s fleet had been smarter than I knew; it was indeed bulletproof.

The most important thing was to keep my pursuers from overtaking me. With no fifth gear there was only one possible way. I took a deep breath, steeled my neck muscles against whiplash, and stomped on the brake.

The vehicle right behind me was too slow to react and slammed into the back of the Escalade at about twenty miles an hour. The whole car rocked violently. Tires screeched. I forced myself to ignore my sudden nausea and kicked the Escalade back into gear, standing on the accelerator, upshifting as fast as I could. As I had hoped, the driver behind me took a little while to recover, and a few seconds passed before it began to close in again.

It got to within about fifty feet before a drone slammed into it from above and lit up the night. I had programmed them to destroy any pursuing vehicles.

That second shockwave lifted my back tires right off the road for a second and tore the back window away. I didn’t see what happened to the third car, but I was confident it wouldn’t be following anything anytime soon. Ahead of me I saw the distant lights of the second gatehouse. Instead of tensing up, I grinned crazily. My heart pounded not with fear but with giddy triumph. I was beginning to comprehend the astonishing power and precision of the force at my command, and I suddenly felt more like an avatar of Shiva the Destroyer than a captive fleeing for his life.

Four streaks fell from the sky as I neared the gatehouse, and bloomed into huge blossoms of flame, razing both gate and buildings. I drove straight through that field of shattered devastation, reached the public road that cut through the dark desert, and raced along it as fast as I could.

The night air was cold and dry. The road seemed endless, and the desert infinite, lit only by the shining moon; my sole headlight had died with the second drone. The Escalade’s engine soon developed a worrying clopping sound. The windscreen was so thoroughly shattered it was almost opaque, and I had to stick my head out of the blasted-out window to navigate.

A faint glow began to illuminate the eastern horizon. The clopping sound grew, and was joined by a whining; the alignment had fallen out of balance. My sense of glorious victory slowly curdled into rediscovered fear. A posse with unlimited resources was doubtless already girding up to pursue me from all directions to the ends of the earth, and I was still in the middle of Mexican nowhere, in a half-shredded vehicle that wouldn’t last much longer, with no more deadly weapons at my disposal, and only a vague idea where I was.

I passed a big green sign that looked familiar. I couldn’t make out the words, and even if I had, I couldn’t have understood them; but there was something about its semiotics, its shape and structure. And the line of light ahead of me in the distance, angled across the road, seemed also somehow familiar…

A highway overpass. Its appearance was so sudden and welcome it was like a mirage in the night. I steered the groaning Escalade up the on-ramp and onto a freshly painted, lightly trafficked, modern four-lane freeway.

Moments later a huge bus whistled past, honking loudly, probably at the wrecked state of my vehicle. Even by Mexican standards it wasn’t suitable for highway driving. But I nursed it onwards at seventy kilometres per hour until the mountains surrounding us were red with incipient dawn, a red that matched the warning lights winking on my dashboard; until the clopping became a clunking, and something seized, and the Escalade slewed to a final halt on the highway shoulder with smoke spewing from its engine.

I felt an irrational sorrow, almost like I had lost a friend. But I couldn’t stay, couldn’t afford to be associated with my fallen steed. So I got out and walked. I was covered with bruises I didn’t remember suffering, and my joints felt soldered shut, especially my neck and painful left hip. But I limped onwards, my thumb out and erect in the hopefully universal symbol for Ride Wanted.

Long minutes passed before a rusting Volkswagen Beetle pulled to a halt ahead of me. A head poked out of its window to regard me. I jogged towards it, ignoring the pain stabbing in my hip. The occupants were three teenage boys with long hair and all-black goth garb. I must have looked pretty rough; they stared at me like I was some kind of drug-induced hallucination.

“Mexico City?” I asked, then remembered the Spanish. “Ciudad de Mexico?”

They exchanged a bemused look, then asked me a question.

I shrugged. “No comprendo. No comprendo nada.” I pointed at myself. “Canadian.” I pointed back down the highway. “Accident.”

After a brief and amazed conferral the back door swung open. I got in before they could change their mind. The car reeked of pot, and the seat belts had long ceased to function. I was in no position to complain, but I spent the ride, which involved a good deal of distracted conversation and inadvertent weaving between lanes, all too aware of how bitterly ironic it would be to survive the night’s previous exertions only to be killed by a stoned driver.

They lit another joint and offered me a toke. I accepted; at that point, why not? Eventually, as the buildings around us grew thicker and taller, they asked me a question, and when I stared at them uncomprehendingly, repeated it with increasing exasperation.

I figured they wanted a more specific destination, but had no answer. The Canadian embassy? But I didn’t want to jump out of Ortega’s fire into the frying pan of Guantanamo Bay. Not when I had at least one potential option. So I said “Downtown, centre-ville,” and hoped the French translated.

Chapter 52

Mexico City was a vast and swarming metropolis, a kaleidoscopic mix of ancient and modern, civilized and backwards. The streets were clogged with ancient vehicles that were mostly rust and gleaming new Mercedes. We travelled down a majestic boulevard lined with skyscrapers, passed ragged potholed alleys covered with spaghetti tangles of improvised wiring. The only constants were noise and chaos.

The VW Bug wove through dense and crazed morning traffic and suddenly emerged onto a ring road around one of the largest public squares I had ever seen, with a massive cathedral on one side and walls of magnificent old buildings on the other three. Crowds teemed everywhere, like army ants.

The Beetle pulled to a halt. “Zocalo,” the driver said helpfully.

I supposed that meant ‘downtown.’ I hesitated, looked at the kids who had rescued me. I didn’t want to ask them for more, but I had to. “No dinero,” I said, pointing at myself. “No dinero, nada. Por favor. Por favor.”

Their expressions twisted and hardened into disgust. I fled the car with no money and new sympathy for beggars.

For what seemed a very long time I stood in that vast open square and gaped at its colossal architecture and hustling crowds of morning commuters, feeling half-dazed, as if in a lucid dream, knowing I was doomed to soon awaken. After what I had just been through, this sudden immersion in everyday normality, a city full of ordinary people, seemed so unreal that it was hard to accept. I felt like Rip van Winkle, or an escapee from a parallel universe.

When my brain finally kicked into gear again I realized I had no idea what to do. I was battered and exhausted and starving and parched. I knew no one in Mexico City, spoke no Spanish, didn’t really know where I was, and dared not go to any authority; I was wanted by Ortega, everyone he had ever corrupted, and every police force on the planet. I had planned for my escape but not my freedom.

There were pay phones near the cathedral, a pair of booths that looked a little like ears. I limped over and tried to use one. Eventually I got an operator, but she spoke no English.

I caught sight of a keeningly familiar symbol across the road, on the perimeter of the square: the golden arches of McDonald’s. They were open for breakfast. I limped there as if drawn by an irresistible force. Once inside I sat down, hoping to rest a moment and maybe poach an abandoned half-empty coffee or orange juice. The staff gave me wary looks but didn’t order me out. My gringo skin, even bruised and bloodied, still carried with it unwritten privileges.

“Christ, mate,” an Australian voice said, “what happened to you?”

I looked up at a big muscular man and his cute blonde girlfriend.

“Did you get mugged?” she asked.

“Mugged. Yeah. Yeah, they took everything.” Which was true. Even the clothes on my back were Ortega’s, not mine.

“What are you going to do?” the Aussie man asked.

His girlfriend said, “You should go to the police.”

I shook my head quickly. “They were police.”

Both seemed appalled but not surprised.

“I just got into town,” I said, “I don’t even know where I am. Do you guys have a map? Or a guidebook?”

“Of course, mate.” He produced a Lonely Planet Mexico guidebook.

“Can we get you some breakfast?” the girl asked.

I looked at her longingly. “Could you? That would, that would be great.”

They trusted me enough to leave their book in my possession while they ordered. I flipped to the Collect Calls subsection, and memorized the number I needed. They came back with a Big Breakfast for me. I have never felt gratitude more keenly: the world’s finest chef could not have crafted a meal as delicious and satisfying as that tray of fast food.

I disengaged from the Australians soon afterwards, told them I had friends staying at a nearby hostel and I would be fine. Back at the pay phone in the shadow of the cathedral, I gave the US operator a number from memory: that of the one person on Earth I knew I could trust.

“This is a collect call,” a robotic voice informed me. “At the sound of the prompt, please say your name.”

I croaked, “Maverick.”

Part 4. Panopticon

Chapter 53

“Sir.” A gentle hand gripped my shoulder. “Sir, I’m sorry.”

I opened my eyes and looked up into a beautiful face framed with dark hair.

“Uh,” I managed.

I had slept so deeply that for long seconds I didn’t know where I was. A long, narrow, oddly tubular room, lushly appointed with wood panelling and tasteful art. There was a faint rushing sound everywhere, the whole room seemed to be softly vibrating, my bed had a seatbelt, and a willowy supermodel had her hand on my shoulder.

“Mr. Ruby told me to awaken you,” she said apologetically. Her Russian accent was thick and charming.

“Uh.” This time I accompanied it with a nod, which seemed to release her into action. She reached down, worked some control, and my bed folded up smoothly into an upright seat. From my new vantage point I could see, through the airplane’s nearest porthole, the island of Hispaniola surrounded by the turquoise Caribbean. The border between the forested Dominican Republic and denuded Haiti was clearly visible.

The cockpit door opened and Jesse stepped back into the cabin, holding a newspaper and grinning cheerfully. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“Thanks.” Behind him I glimpsed a small blond man at the controls. I remembered the ride to the airstrip, and the sight of Jesse leaning casually against Viktor Kharlamov’s Gulfstream, but I didn’t remember actually getting on the plane. I had never been so exhausted.

“I figured you’d appreciate Svetlana’s gentle touch more than mine.”

“Yeah.”

“Champagne, sir?” Svetlana asked. Her uniform consisted of high heels, a short skirt, and a blouse a size too small.

“Uh,” I managed again, a little dizzy, and looked to Jesse.

“Two beers,” he said. “And two for him too.”

The beer was Russian and ice-cold. I took a long swig from my first and looked around in some considerable disbelief. I had so many questions I didn’t know where to begin.

“We’re avoiding American airspace, just in case,” Jesse said. “Stopping in the Bahamas to refuel.”

“Going where?”

“London. Anya’s uncle. He’ll keep you safe ‘til this all resolves. Not too many other places you can go. You seem to have developed something of a reputation.” Jesse slapped the newspaper onto my lap.

It was an English-language Mexico City paper called the Daily News. I sat bolt upright, all lassitude forgotten, jarred into full alertness by the sheer wrongness of my own face, my Caltech ID photo, on the front of a newspaper:

Terror Mastermind In Mexico City

James Kowalski, the alleged “evil genius” behind the wave of terror attacks that killed 114 in New York earlier this week, has fled to Mexico City, according to multiple high-placed sources in the Mexican military and police forces. [Continued on page 4]

I put it down without turning to page 4. It was already too surreal, too scary. And brilliant. How ironic that they called me the evil genius. Ortega had outsourced the job of finding me to Mexico City’s twenty million residents. If not for the aid and shelter provided there by Alejandro-the-biohacker, one of Jesse’s Grassfire friends, I would probably already have died in police custody. Although I supposed my battered face served as something of a disguise. A thin silver lining.

“The Times is a bit less histrionic, but you’ll find yourself in there, too.” Jesse shook his head with mock disapproval. “I swear. I turn my back for one lousy week and you get yourself onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

“So glad you find this amusing.” My voice was sarcastic, but it was true. The awed amusement in Jesse’s voice lifted my spirits more than sympathy could have.

“You are in fact literally on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. You want to see? We’ve got satellite Internet in this thing.”

I winced. “No thanks. Listen. I’ve decided. I’m going to give myself up.”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “Really. What for? So they can lock you in Guantanamo Bay and melt down the key? You feeling particularly martyrish today?”

“Ortega’s going to attack London,” I said. “The G8 meeting. I have to help them stop him. I can tell them.”

“Tell them what exactly? You know the details of his plan?”

“Well, no,” I admitted.

“It is in fact possible to warn them without giving you up, thanks to today’s amazing communications technology. There’s this nifty thing called the Internet.”

“If you take me in, you’ll get in trouble too.”

“James, last time I saw you, you were wrestling a crowd of Haitians and sacrificing yourself to the tender mercies of a bloodthirsty drug cartel so that me and Anya and Sophie might get away. Call me old-fashioned, but I figure that means I owe you one. And believe it or not, you know what, even before that happened I would have risked trouble to keep you out of jail. For fuck’s sake. You are not giving yourself up.” His voice brooked no argument.

“Huh.” I had almost forgotten about my act of heroism.

“Besides, Jorge Ortega is the least of our problems.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I’ve been doing some poking around since me and Anya got back to London. The feds took Sophie to some airbase in Afghanistan to help them with their drones. At least that’s what they think she’s doing. But I think I’m beginning to get an idea of what’s really going on, and if I’m right, Ortega the killer drug lord and his war on the G8 is only the tip of your girlfriend’s iceberg.”

I stared at him incredulously. “You mean Sophie’s behind him?”

“Hell, no. The way I see it, he’s actually in her way.”

“Then what?”

“Near as I can figure,” Jesse said, “she’s trying to take over the world.”

Chapter 54

I leaned forward slowly. “Excuse me?”

“You know Sophie sold her own Axon technology to Ortega.” I nodded. “Well, guess what? She also sold it to the Chinese. And the Russians, and the Indians, the Israelis, the Iranians, the Indonesians, and when she got bored of countries starting with I she went on to the South Africans, the Venezuelans, Pakistan, some Tamil Tiger splinter group, and God knows who else. Then she went and stuck all that money in bank accounts opened in your name. You’re worth about sixty million dollars on paper, ol’ buddy ol’ pal, not that you’ll ever lay a finger on a dime.”

I stared at him wide-eyed.

“Because our Sophie doesn’t care about money, does she? What she cares about is that when everyone inevitably moves to drone-based militaries, and drone-based economies, they use her designs, her neural nets. Right now everybody thinks they’re five years ahead of everybody else, because of their ultra-top-secret new technology that nobody else has, not even the Americans. So they’re all out there desperately developing brand new UAVs and armed quadrupeds and God knows what else, and incidentally committing themselves irrevocably to her Axon architecture while they’re at it.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Yeah. Your girlfriend is already well on the way to being the Bill Gates of the next world order. Everybody locked into her operating system. And she’s got a back door to make any of her nets do what she wants.”

“The override.”

“Bingo. So never mind Ortega. Maybe he assassinates the G8, big deal. Eight fewer figureheads in the world. A little hue and cry and they’ll be replaced. It’s the system that matters, and that’s what Sophie’s trying to replace. She wants her Axons to be the world’s new units of power. In a way Ortega going batshit is good. Otherwise this wouldn’t have come to light.”

“How did it?” I asked. “How do you know all this?”

“Friends in low places, as Garth Brooks once sang.”

“You have friends in secret Chinese military research facilities? How?”

“Grassfire. And elbow grease. You may have noticed I’ve spent the last five years travelling to troubled shitholes all over the world. Did you think I was just screwing around on beaches? Did you think I got jailed in Burma because I got into a bar brawl? I was building a network. A network of networks, really, like the Internet. Individuals and organizations concerned by increasing government oppression and surveillance around the world.” His voice sharpened. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but everywhere you turn these days there are new cameras, new laws, new regulations, a new form to fill out, another piece of ID to carry, all in the name of security, or maybe just convenience. Individually they’re not big enough to get most people upset. Just a little uncomfortable, and what’s comfort next to safety, right? But what’s really happening is liberty dying the death of a thousand cuts all around the world. If we don’t save the world’s people from its governments soon, it will be too late.”

“My God. It’s the great libertarian crackpot conspiracy.” I was stranded somewhere between amazed and appalled. “Let me guess. Grassfire, your network of networks, it’s mostly people who read a lot of Rand and Heinlein growing up, right? Lots of engineers, not so heavy on the social workers?” A flash of enlightenment hit me. “You thought Axon was your big advantage, too. You thought you were five years ahead of everyone else. Convoy was just a cover all along.”

“Not just. In a perfect world, Anya and me really would have spent our time searching for sunken treasure.” He grimaced. “But it’s not a perfect world. Far fucking from it, as recent events show. So, yes, to answer your question, we know people, indirectly, in Chinese military research facilities, and all kinds of other interesting places. We even have facilities to manufacture our own drones.”

“Wait, wait, what? You have your own drone air force?”

“Only a few dozen. We’re just beginning to gear up for mass production.”

“Mass production,” I echoed. “This is insane.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jesse winced. “Sorry. You wouldn’t have approved. You’ve still got that reflex Canadian faith in government. In defiance of both history and reason, I might add. You might have gotten all political on us and decided you had to tell someone. We just couldn’t take the chance.”

“Yeah,” I said dully. My best friend had hidden the most important thing in his life from me for years. It felt like being stabbed in the stomach with a rusty knife. It was almost as bad as Sophie’s betrayal.

A heavy silence fell.

“Fucking politics,” Jesse said. “Ruins everything it touches. Guess what? Anya and I broke up.”

I blinked, shocked. “Really?”

“Yeah. We’re still, like, business partners, but not… not romantic. Not any more. Just, we couldn’t handle both, it was too much. Stress and strain. Conflict between duty and, ah, I don’t know, whatever the fuck. Yeah. Right after we got back from Haiti. Or maybe I did something there that made her… Fuck. I don’t know.”

I had never seen him so incoherent while sober. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” He sighed. “Me too.”

After a long moment I said, “Look on the bright side. At least she didn’t sell weapons to psychotic Mexican drug lords in your name and get you catapulted onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.”

“I’ve always wanted to be on that list. It’s been, like, my life’s ambition.”

“Then you should have stayed with Sophie.”

He barked a laugh. “Yeah. We can sure can pick ‘em, eh?”

I shook my head ruefully. “It’s almost funny. Ortega kills the head of the DEA and a hundred people in New York, and now this crazy octuple presidential assassination -“

“Some of them are prime ministers. I think one’s actually a chancellor.”

“Don’t distract me with details. He kills the leaders of the free world so he can showcase his super-duper killer new technology to would-be customers,” a rationale that still seemed insane but was the only one available, “and meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, everyone who’s anyone already had it the whole time.”

“Yeah.”

“But what do you care, right? You’ll be cheering him on from the sidelines. Death to the Presidents! Down with the governments!”

“Hey,” he said sharply. “Being libertarian does not mean I support anyone’s murder, not even a president. And even politically I do not want Ortega to succeed. Far from it. From a proper perspective a few politicians less makes no difference, but if the G8 get whacked, I guarantee you governments everywhere will use it as the excuse for some seriously draconian fascism, and most of the sheep will be so scared they won’t even argue. Half will probably fucking applaud. We need him to fail if we’re going to have any chance at success.”

“Success?”

Jesse didn’t answer.

I decided to table that for later. “So you do want to stop him.”

“Sure I do. If we could.”

“But we can.” I took a deep breath. “I can. With the override sequence. That’s why I have to turn myself in.”

Jesse gave me an oh-for-God’s-sake look. “James, I am terribly sorry to be the bearer of such awful news, but there is still no overwhelming need for you to crucify yourself. I seem to recall that Sophie knows at least as much about the override as you do, and she’s working with the Americans now.”

“Is she really.”

“Well. Theoretically. Who knows what the fuck she’s really up to. But the G8 meeting begins in Greenwich in five days. You think you can make them listen to you before then? Nuh-uh. If they found out you’re not guilty, they would very quickly figure out that Sophie is. And that means she’ll have already manufactured nine different proofs of your guilt. Every system she’s ever built has multiple redundant levels of security. No way they’ll believe you.”

He was right, but – “How else are we supposed to stop him?”

“Maybe we could do it ourselves.”

“Right,” I said sarcastically. “Of course. I mean, not that I don’t admire your libertarian do-it-yourself ethos. But I happen to have more faith in the collective efforts of the British and American governments and their billions of dollars and millions of people and entire fucking militaries than your little network of would-be John Galts. Call me a crazy deluded socialist.”

“Fair enough,” Jesse said, unruffled. “But why not have both? Like I said, we can warn them without turning you in. I don’t know what you’ll have to add, honestly. There’s already all kinds of chatter that whoever hit New York will attack the G8 next. Probably mostly from conspiracy theorists who happen to be right for once, but they’re already taking that threat seriously.”

I stared at him. “Then they should cancel the meeting. Or move it.”

“They can’t. Imagine how that would look. The eight most powerful men and women in the world hiding from a nasty rumour? Might as well have everyone huddling in mineshafts forever. So they’re still going to hold it, but the security will be insane.”

“The security will be irrelevant against multiple swarms of drones,” I protested. “Unless they’ve got something that can shoot down UAVs on thirty seconds’ notice.”

“I know. Not that we know of. They’re already working on anti-drone drones, and by ‘they’ I mean a team headed by your girlfriend, using her Axon architecture of course. But I can’t see them being ready by next week.”

“Just for the record,” I said bitterly, “I’m not really still thinking of her as my girlfriend. Selling me out to a drug cartel that tortures people to death for fun is kind of a big relationship no-no in my book.”

“You’re so judgmental.”

“What can I say. My surname is Kowalski and my given name is James and there is a slight flaw in my character.”

He smiled at the reference and switched back to the subject of killing drones. “An electromagnetic pulse, maybe. That would knock them out of the air. Like Haiti.”

“Maybe. But multiple swarms, coming in at staggered times – they wouldn’t stop them all. And the bombs are triggered by impact, they’d still go off.”

Jesse shrugged. “Maybe there’s something else up their sleeve, but nothing we’ve heard about, and we hear about most things.”

“Right. Grassfire. Remind me again how exactly you conjured up this vast global conspiracy of top-secret informants? You went backpacking through hacker spaces around the world and they all just popped out of the woodwork?”

“Yes, exactly,” he said tartly. “No, of course not. We’ve spent years encouraging people who believe in liberty to seek out positions close to the gears of power, especially technical positions, and report on what they learn. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t just me. It wouldn’t have been possible without Anya’s uncle’s money. Also.” He took a breath. “You ever heard of a hacker named LoTek?”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sophie told me once you were friends.”

“Grassfire is his baby as much as mine.”

“Huh. You ever heard of two other hackers?” I asked, remembering Dmitri’s tale of how he had gotten Sophie’s technology. “Shadow and Octal?”

“I think Anya used to know them. Black hats. Why?”

“Ortega bought his neural nets through them.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Makes sense Sophie didn’t deal directly.”

I made a noise that might have sounded like a laugh. “Says you. Nothing she did makes sense to me.”

“Did she ever tell you how she knew LoTek?” Jesse leaned forward. “How when she was still a teenager she got recruited into helping with illegal medical research that killed hundreds? She was just a kid. She was doing it for her father. I’m not saying she hasn’t changed. But still. It speaks to a certain callous disregard that I don’t think she’s yet outgrown. I think we’d both agree our Sophie doesn’t necessarily put much value on a single ordinary human life. That’s what scares me.”

I couldn’t argue with that either. “So what are you going to do? When you talked about success before, what did that mean?”

“Freedom,” Jesse said simply. “You see what drones are doing to the world already. Now try to imagine ten years from now, when they’re smaller, and smarter, and there are millions of them. They could be great equalizers, the most powerful weapon for individual liberty ever discovered. But if one person, one organization, can control all of them, which is exactly what Sophie is trying to do by giving away her technology and keeping her override, they’ll become a tool for tyrants that makes Orwell look like a pleasant daydream. Surveillance drones, killer drones, who knows what they might turn into in ten, twenty years’ time. Genocide drones? Pandemic drones? Thoughtcrime drones?” He shook his head seriously. “You understand the stakes here? We’re talking about the future of humanity. No joke. We can’t let that happen. No matter what the cost.”

I raised my eyebrows. Jesse had always had megalomaniacal tendencies but I had never heard him frame himself as the messiah before.

“I mean it, buddy.” He looked grim. “This is some seriously apocalyptic shit.”

Could he actually be right? It was true that by seeding her neural networks around the world Sophie was playing a game with the whole globe as her chessboard and colossal repercussions, win or lose. Might history look back on it as the beginnings of the ultimate struggle for the mankind’s future? Despite Jesse’s rhetoric, that didn’t seem likely – but I had to admit it wasn’t completely out of the question.

I couldn’t imagine why Sophie could have done what she had done, betrayed me, cut secret deals with nations and drug cartels and terror groups. Was Jesse right? Was she a power-mad sociopath? I couldn’t believe that. Maybe she had hidden a whole secret life from me, but I still knew her better than anyone. She had acted like she was carrying an awful burden, not seeking ultimate supremacy.

I shook my head as if that might clear it. I wanted to go for a long hard run until I was gasping and unable to think at all.

“Never mind all that,” I said curtly. “Let’s try and focus on now. The G8. What kind of good do you really think we can do?”

He already had something in mind. I could see it in his face.

“What?” I demanded.

“London,” he said thoughtfully. “Anywhere else, maybe we couldn’t do much, but they’re coming to London. That just might be Ortega’s big mistake.”

“Why? How?”

“Argus.”

The name meant nothing to me. “What’s that?”

He said, “You’ll see.”

Chapter 55

The Bahamas were a string of green-and-gold jewels set in the blue Atlantic. We landed and refuelled at a small airport on an island whose name I never learned. It was a nervous stop; I feared extraordinary rendition until we were safely airborne again.

Green and pleasant England was steeped in a thin mist pink with dawn. We touched down not at Heathrow or Gatwick, but on a strip of lawn surrounded by a rickety fence. I had never landed on grass before. The Gulfstream’s door unfolded out into a staircase, and I stepped down onto a new continent, where Anya Azaryeva waited beside a sleek black BMW.

It was barely dawn, but as always she was runway-ready; clinging jeans, a midriff-baring shirt, high-heeled boots and a thigh-length fur coat. As usual I had to look away from her, and her unexpectedly warm hug hello made me shiver a little. She and Jesse exchanged strained looks, awkward and uncomfortable.

“When you said immigration wouldn’t be a problem, I thought you’d get me fake ID,” I said to break the ice.

Anya said, “Not necessary. This is a private airstrip.”

“But they must track flights on radar, right? Don’t they ask -“

“International passengers on private jets must present themselves to immigration within 24 hours. One of my uncle’s associates will do so later today, in your place.”

“Huh. The rich really are different from you and me.”

Anya gave me a strangely wounded look.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “Just a quote.”

“I know,” she said curtly.

We climbed into the BMW. The driver, a man with a scarred bald head, guided us onto a country road and then a motorway. The we-just-broke-up tension between Anya and Jesse was palpable.

“We’re going straight to London?” I asked. “To your uncle?”

Anya nodded.

“Lot of Russians there nowadays, I guess,” I said banally, hoping that speech would be less awkward than the silence.

Jesse muttered, “I call it Moscow on the Thames.”

Anya said tersely, “You can call it whatever you like.”

“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”

She turned to me. “London has always welcomed exiles. My uncle is only the most recent in a proud history. De Gaulle in World War II. Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital there. The Jews, the Huguenots, refugees from the Inquisition. Even Julius Caesar was an exile, in a way, when he crossed the Thames at what is now Brentford, just west of London.”

“My, aren’t we the scholar,” Jesse said.

“I received a proper classical education. All you ever studied was money and engineering. You’ve never shown the slightest appreciation for the finer things in life.”

It was a snooty and dismissive accusation but, I had to admit, not inaccurate. Jesse had never been much interested in art or literature or music.

“Other than you, of course,” Jesse said ironically.

“If you ever showed me any refined appreciation you hid it well. As far as I’ve been able to tell, you never even learned any manners.”

He burped loudly.

She made a disgusted noise. “Teaching you was like trying to teach a pig.”

“You know, that’s actually true.” He sounded thoughtful but I could tell he was furious. “Because a pig really doesn’t give a shit which dessert spoon you use for the crème brûlée, and you know what, neither do I. Only crass new-money arrivistes like you care about that crap, because you’re terrified you’ll be mistaken for the even crasser ones who put gold leaf on everything. Here’s a hint, honey. You’re fundamentally no different. The top rung of the class heirarchy isn’t on it, it’s outside of it, and anyone can get there, much as that may stick in your craw.”

“Ah, yes. The rationalization of the gutter.”

“We are all in the gutter, my dear, but some of us -“

“Do you even know who said that first?”

“Guys,” I interrupted. “I hate to ruin your fun, but maybe you could have your domestic dispute later, when there are fewer innocent bystanders around?”

They glared at me in unison; both loved to argue, and had just been starting to warm to their vitriol. I felt like an unwanted UN peacekeeper. We rode on in poisoned silence.

London was vast and sprawling. We drove down past endless alabaster Victorians before turning onto a gated side road. Its wrought-iron entrance swung open, and we passed into a street lined by buildings the size of embassies, separated by high hedges topped with barbed wire and security cameras. The BMW turned onto an elliptical driveway from which stairs led up to an ivy-wreathed monstrosity that had to encompass at least a dozen bedrooms. Several marquee cars glittered on its driveway.

A liveried servant met us at the door, took Anya’s fur coat, gave us steaming cups of coffee prepared to our personal specifications, and whisked us through chambers and passageways with ludicrously high ceilings and frighteningly expensive furnishings. The thick walls and carpets seemed to devour all noise. We ascended an elevator gated with lacy iron, and traversed another cavernous corridor before finally stopping at one of the massive mahogany doors.

“This is your room,” Jesse said. “We’ve stocked it with clothes and stuff. Use the intercom if you need anything. Don’t feel bad about asking the servants for stuff, that’s why they’re there. Chill out, have a nap, order some room service. I’ll come grab you in a bit.”

“Sure.” I looked at Anya. “Thank you.”

She made a dismissive motion. “You saved our lives.”

My room featured, among other amenities, a four-poster bed, a Bose sound system connected to a iPod Touch loaded with Jesse’s favourite music, the largest flat-screen TV I had ever seen, and a closet full of designer clothes and Fluevog shoes in my size. I showered, cleaned myself with fifty-dollar soap, donned Armani jeans and a Versace T-shirt, collapsed on the bed and closed my eyes, more mentally than physically drained.

I was finally beginning to understand that I should have been more careful about what I wished for on that long-ago day when I had decided to sacrifice everything in order to aspire to an extraordinary life. Extraordinary did not mean good, and now I was drinking from extraordinary’s firehose, drowning in its deep end. The old me would have laughed contemptuously at the notion that it was better to live in Pasadena and work at a quiet job than to ricochet from Colombian jungle to Caribbean yacht to drug lord’s dungeon to billionaire’s mansion. But all I wanted was to somehow turn back the clock.

Of course that could never happen. My old life was as dead as Ancient Rome. I understood too late that one of the defining features of a truly extraordinary life is its irreversibility. Once you have hurdled half a dozen standard deviations it is not easy to push your life back up to the peak of Gauss’s mountain.

I dozed dejected for some time, until a knock on the door roused me. Jesse.

“C’mon,” he said, “I’ll introduce you to the titan.”

Chapter 56

I followed Jesse through Anya’s uncle’s sumptuous labyrinth, past servants like faceless shadows, into a corner room lit by two huge windows that revealed wide swathes of very expensive urban real estate. A disused easel sat in a corner; its place of honour had been usurped by an ebony table laden with MacBook Pros. Anya sat before one of them. Jesse and I sat beside her in leather swivel chairs so soft and comfortable I never wanted to get up again.

“So. Argus,” Jesse said. “You know the word panopticon?”

I shook my head.

Anya explained: “It once meant a prison where all privacy is extinguished. Today it means London. This is the world’s surveillance capital. More than one million closed-circuit cameras in this city, millions more in the rest of the country. The UK government has recently connected all those they control into a single network called Argus, after Argus Panoptes, the titan with a hundred eyes. With it you can survey almost all of London, if you are a senior police officer or politician.”

“Big Brother’s wet dream,” Jesse said. “But we prefer two-way windows to one-way glass. So with the help of some friends, we hacked into their panopticon.”

LoTek, I thought, taking the news almost casually. My capacity for surprise appeared to have been numbed by overuse.

Anya indicated the nearest MacBook. “Without leaving this room we can look through any camera in London, or go through six weeks of archives. We’ve been amassing dossiers on politicians opposed to civil liberties. Some live very interesting lives indeed. We intend to teach them exactly how the loss of privacy can lead to the loss of liberty.”

“And you think we can use Argus to find Ortega’s drones.”

“I’m sure of it. And when we do, we will need Sophie’s override sequence from you.”

“Find them how exactly? I’m guessing his people aren’t exactly in the habit of turning to the nearest camera and shouting ‘Hi, Mom! After I kill the G8, I’m going to Disneyland!’”

“There are ways, James. Don’t underestimate us. But we need to know that the override will work. Is it just a command sent over the drones’ control channel? Is there a chance they might filter it out?”

I smiled thinly, remembering the sense of giddy triumph I had felt when my swarm hack had succeeded. “They tried that in Mexico. I found a workaround. But you need physical access to at least one of their drones.” Only identically programmed neural nets could form a swarm; we couldn’t take over their drones with one of our own.

“Why? How does it work?”

“The intra-swarm net. The one they use to communicate with each other.”

I explained the details, then used the computer nearest me to log on to Hushmail and forward the override code to Anya and Jesse.

“Excellent,” Anya said, with relief and something like triumph in her normally cool voice. I supposed she had been stressing out at the thought of Ortega’s unstoppable drone army. Jesse gave her a curious look, apparently as surprised as I by the sudden crack in her ice-queen armour. “Now,” she continued quickly, “all we must do is find them.”

“How?” I asked.

Jesse said, “Argus. Give me one thread and I’ll unravel their whole veil.”

“Great. What thread?”

“Your BFF Dmitri. We figure he’s been here in London sometime in the last month.”

“Maybe not. They’ve got a whole team of people. He wasn’t the one who actually trained the neural nets. But OK, maybe. So what?”

“First we need his face. We’ve assembled a series of photos, Russian hackers from his era.” Jesse indicated a minimized slideshow icon on my computer. “See if he’s in there.”

The slideshow was a motley assortment of group shots from hacker conventions, webcam screenshots, stills from surveillance cameras, and many of inexplicable provenance. One sequence appeared to be from a bear hunt. Another featured two dozen geeky-looking individuals, all dressed as Santa Claus, roaming the streets of Tokyo. I was nearing the end, and losing hope, when I finally recognized a familiar face.

“Dana,” I said sharply, and pointed at a cell-phone group shot taken in a bar called PROPAGANDA. Its neon sign was in English but all other written material was Cyrillic. “That’s her. Dmitri’s girlfriend.”

“You’re sure?” Jesse asked.

I hesitated. “Almost.” I clicked to the next shot. The same group, with some kind of canal behind them. Dmitri and Dana stood in the middle, his arm around her. “And that’s him,” I said excitedly. “What is that, Venice?”

“St. Petersburg,” Anya said.

According to its metadata photo was two years old. But hadn’t Dmitri said they had met only last year? And in Moscow, not St. Petersburg? I supposed it didn’t matter. “Great. Now what?”

“Now we find them.”

“Right. How?”

“We outsource the first stage,” she said. “Finding their real names and their data shadows. Online handles, profiles, email addresses, everything. Grassfire has people at Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. LiveJournal, that’s very popular in Russia. Major backbone providers, mobile phone networks, databases everywhere. We should know in an hour whether Dmitri or Dana have logged on to any such accounts recently. If so, we can isolate the individual computers they used. If even one of those computers was in London, they are ours.”

“Huh.” I was something like awed.

“Are you frightened that we can do this? Trace them from an old picture to their current location?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “You should be. It frightens me too. That’s why we must act while we can. This is only the beginning of the panopticon dystopia.”

“But it’s OK in your hands,” I said. “Because you guys are the good kind of omniscient eyes and ears operating completely outside the law with no checks or balances. Right?”

Jesse grinned. “Yes, exactly. We’re benevolent dictators. How could anyone possible think otherwise?”

“How indeed. That’s so comforting.”

“Ain’t it? But the mushroom cloud of ubiquitous surveillance is not about to go back into its uranium casing. All we can do is ensure that the transparency is two-way, so that you can spy on me spying on you.”

I shrugged. “Who has the time these days?”

At that Anya laughed aloud. It hadn’t seemed that funny to me, but I guessed it tickled the Russian sense of humour.

“Come,” she said, standing, “let’s have lunch in the attic.”

She used the intercom to issue commands in Russian, then led us down a hallway and up marble stairs, to a steel door with rubber seals. The sudden light and colour and fragrance beyond made me gasp. The entire top floor of Kharlamov’s mansion was a floral greenhouse, full of whole fields of flowers arrayed in swirling patterns.

Pathways of raked gravel led between the vividly coloured beds and ziggurats. There were delicate orchids, each in its own glass cage, and rosebushes clipped into the shapes of little girls. A green cylinder seven feet tall stood in a place of honour, droopingly erect and strangely skeletal, like a carnivorous alien from another world.

“The corpse flower,” Anya said. “It blooms only once a year.”

I said inadequately, “This is amazing.”

The air was warm and damp. Except for a web of thin steel girders the roof and walls were solid glass. She led us along a gravel trail to a wrought-iron bench across from a little plot of churned earth. A piece of paper adorned with a diagram of a complicated spiral pattern, footnoted in big flowery handwriting, sat on that barren dirt, weighed down by a sinuous hunk of green malachite. Plans for its reconstruction, I supposed.

Something about that piece of paper tickled something in the back of my brain. I wondered if I’d seen that spiral pattern before. One of the fractals that so fascinated Sophie, perhaps.

“I try to come here at least once a day,” Anya said. “To be surrounded by beauty.”

“We’re wasting time,” Jesse muttered.

“Yes, of course. Jesse never likes it here,” she said to me. “It isn’t useful.”

I grimaced awkwardly.

“It’s the Russian temperament,” Jesse explained to me. “She needs to spend at least an hour a day brooding uselessly about things, or her life is incomplete.”

“Yes, exactly,” she said acidly. “Unlike you careless Canadians.”

I tried to change the subject. “Remember the good old cold-war days when you Russians were the bad guys?”

She raised an eyebrow. “We were taught you were the bad guys.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The Americans, sure, capitalist pig running dogs, but we Canadians have socialized medicine and open-door immigration. Actually we always kind of liked you Russkies. You were the enemy, but you were a cool enemy, and you played hockey. Hard to imagine Osama bin Laden on skates. Or Jorge Ortega.”

“And now your NHL has bought all our best players.”

“I’m pretty sure most of them come of their own free will.”

“For the almighty American dollar.”

I looked at her. “No offense, but I wouldn’t expect you of all people to be complaining about the abuses of the rich.”

She looked around at her private park. “Why? Because of all this? Because my uncle is a billionare?”

“Well,” I said, “yeah.”

“He wasn’t always. My family, we were well educated, before the revolution we were aristocrats, but James, I grew up poor. A big Moscow apartment tower, three of us sleeping in one room. Cockroaches. Sometimes no hot water, even in winter. When the USSR collapsed, that was a terrible time. So many homeless. Children, even, like wolves. Criminals everywhere. Gunshots at night. My other uncle was murdered. We ate meat only once a week. The schools were terrible, no computers, nothing. Uncle Viktor, nobody thought he would amount to anything, he was an actor who collected scrap metal. But maybe because all Moscow was scrap, that began to matter.”

“He made a billion dollars out of scrap metal?” I asked incredulously.

“Among other things. They were strange times, Moscow in the nineties.”

“And the Russian government tried to assassinate him a few years ago, right? That whole radiation-poisoning thing?” That bizarre story had gotten major coverage around the world. The Kremlin had never admitted responsibility, but couldn’t deny that a former KGB agent had come to London, poisoned Kharlamov’s senior advisor with polonium, returned to Russia, and subsequently been shielded from extradition.

“Yes. If he hadn’t had the flu that day… You see, he supports democracy movements in the motherland. He always calls it that.” An indulgent, amused smile flickered on her lips. “That is our ultimate goal at Grassfire. Freedom for all motherlands. But we must be careful with our money. No matter how pure your intentions, money is always a weapon of oppression. I see that clearer than ever now. Money, power, they do strange things to people.” She gave Jesse a meaningful look.

“Like what?” I asked.

“When you have them, you become different, no matter how hard you fight to remain the same. Power corrupts, this we all know, but do you know the mechanism? It severs your human connections. It sets you adrift. People, even friends, even family, they come to you not for your company, but for your power. I see it myself. Since I was thirteen, since he became rich, the whole world sees me as a tool, not a person. An access point. An interface to my uncle’s good graces. All beautiful women experience something like that, being a symbol, a goal, a thing. But for me it was much more stark. No one was ever interested in me as a person. Only in what I could bring to them.”

“Sophie used to say the same kind of thing sometimes, about being a genius,” I mused, then realized I had just spoken of her in the past tense for the first time.

Anya looked dubious. “Maybe it’s similar.”

Again I wondered how and why Sophie could have betrayed me.

The door to the greenhouse opened, and two servants appeared, carrying a food. They did not speak a word as they arrayed our lunch on a folding table. I had never had caviar before. I pretended to like it.

Back in the corner studio, Jesse and Anya checked email. She scanned a missive written in Cyrillic, and grunted with satisfaction. “Bad news and good. All Dmitri’s access was via Tor, untraceable. But Dana logged on to Gmail from an Internet cafe in Earl’s Court three weeks ago. A fatal error, I think.”

“Gotcha.” Jesse grinned. “Now we look through the eyes of Argus, and we see all there is to see.”

Chapter 57

Anya and I shoulder-surfed while Jesse drove. Argus’s actively user-hostile interface was a complex mix of command lines and windows whose layouts and information density would have given graphic designers gibbering nightmares, but he navigated expertly, rattling out cryptic commands from memory.

When he first logged in I instinctively glanced down at his fingers on the keyboard, and noticed he was still using a password that dated back to high school: ancalag0n, a Tolkien reference. Surprisingly slack security, but then, nobody was supposed to know that this account existed at all.

“Their facial recognition software is pretty awesome,” Jesse said, “they have a whole server farm somewhere doing nothing else. I’m having them go through all the archive data from the cameras near that Internet cafe.”

He flipped to a Google Map stippled with so many green location markers that London looked covered by a thick moss.

“Holy crap,” I said. “Are those all the cameras?”

“No. If we showed all the cameras the whole screen would be green. These are just the densest clusters.”

A minimized window began to flicker, calling for our attention, and he swapped it to the foreground: a YouTube-like video browser. As we watched, tabs accumulated rapidly along its top edge, dozens of them rippling rightwards and then offscreen. He began to flip through them. All were brief fragments of video from black-and-white street-view security cameras, with three-week-old timestamps superimposed in the lower right. A single figure was common to them all, a slender woman with dark hair in a hooded coat. Thanks to her teddy-bear backpack I knew her even before we caught a frontal view of her face: Dana.

“Got you,” Anya whispered.

I nodded. Argus was probably built for exactly this kind of problem: isolate a person in a fragment of video, tag their location at the beginning and end of that shot, access the nearest cameras, and repeat. In the same way that a video was a collection of many still photos, you could construct a narrative out of many short video snippets. In theory you could reconstruct your target’s entire life, so long as they didn’t leave your camera network.

“Look, she went shopping.” Anya sounded amused.

We watched Dana walk into Harrods three weeks ago from the perspective of seven different cameras, some in the department store, some on the streets.

“Fast forward?” I suggested.

Jesse shook his head. “The software can only reconstruct her trail so fast. We’re already near the leading edge. But it’s bidirectional, we can rewind her backwards, too.”

He pushed a button, and time reversed. Dana moonwalked through the Victoria and Albert Museum for a little while, looking like any tourist. She seemed alone. This did not jibe at all with Dmitri’s claim that Ortega kept her in tight custody. I didn’t understand why he had bothered lying to me.

Jesse switched the arrow of time again. Dana bought a box of chocolates for cash in Harrod’s food court, left the store, paid cash for a ticket at the Knightsbridge Underground station, and disappeared into a dense cloud of commuters.

“Shit,” I said.

“No, this is perfect. It’s way easier to track people on the Tube. There are cameras all over the underground, even on the trains, and once they enter a station they can’t disappear into a blind spot, they can only pass through one of a small number of exits or transfer corridors.”

Another minimized window began to flicker. Jesse switched to the map, which now sported a flashing red location marker amid the sea of green. “There, see? She transferred at Piccadilly Circus to the Bakerloo.” The location marker submarined, and reappeared south of the river. “Exited at Lambeth North.”

I shook my head, awed.

“Yes, it’s astonishing, isn’t it?” Anya said. “A technical marvel, a social monster. Imagine when they have camera drones flying all over the city like pigeons. Watching us carefully. Erasing dissent before it even begins.”

“Come on,” I said. “In China, sure, but here? Or the US, or Canada? I can’t see it.”

“Knowledge is power, James, especially secret knowledge, and power corrupts.”

“Shit,” Jesse said. “We lost her. South of the river there are fewer cameras. She vanished on Hercules Road.”

He called up another map of London, this one mottled by a pattern that looked like an ink spill. Pretty much everything inside the Circle Line was a faint pink, but outside, patches of light blue developed, some isolated, some forming sizeable contiguous areas. I understood: a map of panopticon visibility. New islands and coastlines of coverage appeared as we zoomed in. Lambeth North was surrounded by roughly equal amounts of pink and blue. Once on Hercules Road, across from the station, Dana could in theory have walked a full mile without encountering another camera, if she had chosen her course very carefully.

“If we go through all the cameras around there for the last month,” I speculated, “have them look for Dmitri and Dana -“

“Yes,” Anya acknowledged. “But I think we will learn little more. Did you see, she paid cash for everything? They know they might be watched. No coincidence, I think, that she came from and went to a place outside of Argus’s remit.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jesse shrugged. “What else? We do it ourselves.”

“Ourselves?”

He grinned. “Fetch me my deerskin cap, Watson. The game’s afoot!”

“Not you,” Anya said to me. “The police will be looking for you, and they have Argus too.”

I nodded slowly. “Live by the panopticon, die by the panopticon.”

“Yes,” Jesse said, “exactly.”

I felt a bit bereft, a little like Miss Moneypenny wishing Bond luck, as I watched Jesse and Anya depart to investigate the situation on Hercules Road. But I wasn’t that worried about their safety, as they were bringing some of her uncle’s security men; and I didn’t really wish I was going with them. I felt like I had already used up my lifetime quota of adventure, and then some. Sitting in a luxury mansion waiting for my friends to return and tell me about their adventures seemed like a perfectly reasonable and defensible way to spend the rest of my life.

While waiting I used Tor to log into my private Gmail account, known only to Jesse and a few old friends. Several had sent me emails, probably wondering what the hell had happened to me and/or encouraging me to turn myself in. I decided that on second thought I didn’t want to read them and be reminded of my former life. That life was over.

I was about two seconds away from logging out when a chat window opened unexpectedly on my screen.

The person at the other end was Dr. Sophie Warren.

Chapter 58

I stared at the blank emptiness of the GChat window, not knowing what to think, until words crawled across it:

SW: james is that really you?

I swallowed, wondering the same thing in reverse. It was her style, at least; for whatever reason, she and I never used uppercase characters when IMing each other. My fingers found their way to the keyboard and I responded:

JK: yes.

SW: proof, please. sorry but don’t know what to believe.

I took a deep breath, thought of a nonsensical pillow-talk in-joke -

JK: pumpkin potato, but never potato pumpkin

SW: oh thank god

SW: james i thought you were dead. i thought you were dead it and it was my fault. sory for typos i’m crying can’t really see. what happened? where are you?

JK: your turn. how do i know it’s you?

SW: you never clean the french press right after you use it, no matter how many times i ask. when you open beer bottles you put the caps on top of the fridge.

SW: enough, or do you want more?

It was enough. I licked my lips, then asked the big one:

JK: how could you do it?

SW: do what?

JK: like you don’t fucking know.

SW: probably but i’m not sure.

JK: selling axon to drug cartels and rogue nations and funnelling the money into the bank accounts i never knew i had. pretending i was doing it. never telling me anything.

SW: i couldn’t. james I am so sorry, you have no idea because words can’t express, but there was just too much at stake. no one was supposed to find out. it just all got fucked up.

When I read that I snarled audibly at her use of the passive voice.

SW: are you with them now? jesse and anya?

JK: no.

It wasn’t technically a lie, not that I should have cared about lying to her. I felt my pulse quickening into a drumbeat of rage that threatened to overwhelm me.

SW: then where are you? what happened? can i help? send money, anything? just name it.

JK: the fucking nerve on you. help? sure. you can stop pretending like we’re still even friends. you deceive me for three years, ruin my life, nearly get me tortured to death, and now you want to do something for me? ok. turn yourself in, admit everything, clear my name. make me an innocent man again. that would be a fucking good start.

SW: i can’t do that yet. i will when I can, but that’s not yet.

JK: then how about you just fuck off and die.

I was breathing hard, felt like I was floating in a wave of fury. I very nearly closed the window and blocked any further communications. Why had she even started this conversation? Did she seriously think there was any chance that I might forgive her?

But of course that was exactly what she thought. In Sophie’s mind she had done no wrong. In Sophie’s mind she was incapable of doing any wrong, because her genius mind was perfect, and therefore so was everything it had ever thought.

SW: james, i am wracked, wracked, by guilt for what i have done. i stay up crying every night. but we have no time for that now. are you in contact with jesse and/or anya? i have found out some seriously scary things. i need to know how much they know.

I stared at that message for a long moment.

JK: like what?

SW: we have strong evidence that ortega is planning to attack g8. maybe you can confirm?

JK: wouldn’t surprise me.

SW: well. that’s clearly insane, no? he’ll be bin-laden-level global pariah. and ortega is, by all accounts, both smart and sane. So why do it?

I blinked. The same question had occurred to me.

JK: let me guess. you have an answer.

SW: yeah. a really bad one. remember how we tracked the drones coming from colombia via haiti on satellite pix?

I remembered the conversation in Clark’s office, what felt like a million years ago. Squadrons of thirty drones a day had been caught on camera flying across the Caribbean to the USA. That was how we had concluded Ortega had at a hundred and twenty drones at his disposal; it was four days roundtrip between Colombia and Florida.

JK: sure.

SW: well, we have not ever found pictures of any flying back to colombia. looked hard. no dice. initially we figured they just took a different route, maybe overland via mexico. but that makes no sense. you increase discovery risk by an order of magnitude, for nothing.

SW: am starting to think: maybe the real reason ortega is attacking the g8 is because someone else put him up to it.

SW: am starting to think: maybe we never found drones going back to colombia because none of them ever went back.

I read that three times. It didn’t make any more sense the second or third time.

SW: thirty drones a day for more than a year makes approximately 12,000 drones in total.

I goggled at that number for a second before responding.

JK: no way. not possible.

SW: i wish you were right but you’re not.

I shook my head violently at the screen.

JK: no. the money doesn’t add up. twelve thousand drones at half a million $ per is six billion dollars. plus costs to build the factory and fabrication plant, plus shipping, security, sundry. call it ten billion. even ortega’s not that rich. And they would have had to have started years ago.

SW: exactly, exactly, exactly. ortega couldn’t have done it. only major nation-states can plan and commit resources like that.

SW: my increasingly terrifyingly plausible worst-case scenario is this: the g8 is just a test run. a nation-state – china? russia? iran? – has been using ortega as a deniable sockpuppet to smuggle 12,000 drones into america, and is now preparing a massive drone attack that will bomb the usa back to the bronze age.

SW: it’s the only theory that explains everything.

SW: please tell me i’m wrong.

Chapter 59

I stared at the screen. I felt like the whole world was wobbling around me, and the blood in my veins had frozen into icewater. I had watched six drones destroy a heavily guarded military compound. Six more had killed more than a hundred New Yorkers. I could hardly begin to imagine the havoc that twelve thousand might wreak on an unprepared nation.

It was crazy, it sounded like some apocalyptic conspiracy, far too terrifying and gargantuan to be true – but it explained so much. Who had retrained Sophie’s drones with new capabilities: a whole team of military experts somewhere. Why Dmitri had lied to me: they had always intended to let me go eventually, so I could support the “it was all the drug cartels” story. Why they had attacked New York and planned to attack the G8: nothing to do with Ortega showcasing his wares, both of those attacks were probes, testing the waters to see what defenses the West could muster. They had a gun to America’s head and were checking to make sure it wouldn’t blow up in their hand if and when they pulled the trigger. The G8 attack doubled as a decapitatation strike, eliminating leadership and sowing chaos before the real assault began.

My fingers typed my thoughts:

JK: holy

JK: fucking

JK: shit.

SW: indeed.

SW: where are you? can i come see you?

At that irrational rage flared in me again.

JK: anya and jesse and i are a little busy trying to save the g8. also, I’m the world’s third most-wanted man or something, thank you so much for that, so i’m kind of trying to minimize my social calendar just now.

SW: sorry about that. don’t worry, we’ll get it all sorted out when this over. please believe me. everything was necessary. i’ll explain when i see you.

I couldn’t believe she actually thought she could explain all this away. As if what she had done to me just needed to be fixed, like an engineering problem, and everything would be hunky-dory again.

I logged out. Between the sudden enormity of the stakes, and the poisonous feeling that curdled in me every time Sophie said anything personal, I couldn’t take any more. Besides, it didn’t matter what I said or thought. Sophie and Jesse and Anya would take things from here. They were the extraordinary ones. What I did had never been relevant. Even my triumphant escape from Mexico had been redundant.

I made my way back up to the greenhouse, drawn there by instinct. Its fecund sights and smells were somehow life-affirming, and just then I needed all the affirmation I could get. I sat on the wrought-iron bench and stared at nothing, awed sick by the magnitude and horror of what Sophie had suggested. Twelve thousand kamikaze drones in the USA, armed and ready to be launched on an utterly devastating attack.

But no, it was too crazy. How could anyone plan to hit the USA with a crippling military attack and still hope to remain anonymous?

Then again, after such an attack, America might be too busy dying to mount any investigation. With twelve thousand drones you could wipe out most major power plants, refineries, pipelines, airports, hospitals, dams, bridges, rail lines, communications centres, server farms – the whole country would shut down for weeks. I tried to imagine New York and L.A. with no power, gas, communications or food deliveries, for maybe a month.

It was a terrifying thought. The USA was built on fragile infrastructure, as the 2003 power outage and Hurricane Katrina disaster had proved. If that infrastructure was all destroyed at once, there would be looting, riots, maybe even starvation before stability was reestablished, weeks or even months later. The economy would collapse like a punctured balloon, and take decades to recover. And that only if the enemy didn’t follow up the first crippling blow with others.

But it wouldn’t happen, I reassured myself, because we had a secret weapon. We could still use Sophie’s override to shut down their drones, and the enemy didn’t even know it existed. The only people who did were me, Sophie, Jesse and Anya.

The enemy. The power behind Ortega, if Sophie was right. Who?

I decided to go back and re-establish IM contact. What she had done to me was unforgivable but we had to work together now. There was too much at stake.

I stood and walked about twenty paces away from that metal bench. Then I stopped, hesitated a moment, and turned back.

Something nagging at my brain. That little piece of paper on the empty plot across from the bench, the one with the spiral diagram and the flowery footnotes – it looked oddly familiar. Not the diagram. The distinctive handwriting. That big, flowery, and somehow feminine cursive script. It looked very much like the writing on the note I had found in Jorge Ortega’s torture chamber.

A weird coincidence. My mind playing tricks on me in a stressful moment. I turned and walked away again. This time I got as far as the door to the greenhouse.

Then I turned back again, and returned to the bench again, and stared at that little piece of paper again.

It looked a lot like that note in Mexico.

Anya’s handwriting? Probably. This greenhouse garden seemed to be her personal fiefdom.

But of course it couldn’t have been Anya’s handwriting in that horrifying room of blood I had found deep beneath that abandoned military academy in Mexico. Right? Anya and Kharlamov couldn’t be on the other side, working for the shadowy forces behind Ortega.

No. Not even Kharlamov and Ortega combined were wealthy enough for what Sophie suspected. Like she said, it had to be a nation-state.

Like Russia. Could Anya be a double agent for the Kremlin? No, that made no sense: Russia’s president was scheduled for execution with the rest of the G8.

… Although he was just a figurehead. The real power lay with their prime minister. And losing their own president would add credibility to claims of innocence after the attack.

It occurred to me that if I were a former KGB agent turned Russian prime minister, and I was planning an all-out military assault on the United States, one level of deniable catspaws wouldn’t be enough. I would want an intermediary to reach out to Ortega and orchestrate all the details. A powerful and visible backup scapegoat who no one would connect to the Kremlin. For instance, a billionaire who had famously been exiled from Russia and very publicly nearly assassinated by the Russian government.

What if all that had been a deception, to put Kharlamov beyond suspicion?

Russians were everywhere in this mess, now that I thought about it. Ortega’s pet hacker, Dmitri. The hackers he said had brought him the Axon designs, Shadow and Octal; also Russian. And then there was Anya.

Anya who had begun to date Jesse, Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, shortly after Sophie published her first Axon paper; who had helped him to create the secret but powerful Grassfire network, whose tentacles reached seemingly everywhere; who had funded Convoy and thus won direct access to Sophie and her work; who in Haiti had been full of questions about the US military’s anti-drone capabilities; and who had demanded the secret override sequence within hours of my arrival in London, and seemed profoundly relieved and triumphant when she received it.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud.

Had I just given the enemy the one thing that might have stopped the attack? Had that whole notion of using Argus to find Ortega’s drones just been misdirection, to lure me into surrendering our sole secret weapon? Was she out there right now not to hunt them down, but only to verify what I had told her?

It was just supposition, I reassured myself, as I rushed back to the skylit studio. We didn’t even know Sophie’s apocalyptic scenario was true. The only evidence was circumstantial at best. And even if someone had smuggled a massive drone armada in to the USA, that was only the first step. They needed people to move them around the country, distribute them, warehouse them, hide them, reprogram them with new releases, arm them, launch them. That meant a vast and secret conspiracy, scores if not hundreds of people, an entire hidden network.

Like the KGB. They were called the FSU nowadays, of course, the name KGB had gone out with the cold war. The cold war that maybe had never actually ended. Russia was ruled by former KGB agents, and they were no less resourceful, no less capable, and no less dangerous than in the bad old days. Only weeks ago I had read about a dissident Chechen gunned down outside his Dubai apartment by masked assassins.

But even if Sophie was right, even if the Russians were planning to attack America, surely I was just being paranoid about Anya. The handwriting was coincidence, not evidence. She was on our side. Soon that would be clear again, soon this sick feeling of overwhelming guilt, like I had just accidentally condemned all my friends to death, would go away -

The MacBooks in the corner studio displayed starfield screen-savers. I sat down at one and swiped impatiently at the trackpad. A login screen popped up. I stared as if it was a pet dog unexpectedly replaced by a rabid wolf. Those machines had not demanded passwords before.

I decided to call Jesse on the land line. Just to check in with him. Just to see what was going on. There would be no harm in it, and just then I really needed to hear him tell me that I had not just damned the USA to bloody destruction.

There was no dial tone. I pushed 9, but nothing happened.

“Can I assist?” a man asked.

He had appeared as if by magic at the door, dressed in the black-and-ivory uniform of Kharlamov’s servants, but it didn’t seem to quite fit. His eyes were hard, his nose was much-broken, and his Russian accent was harsh and thick; but more than that, he didn’t disappear into the background like Kharlamov’s other liveried men. This was a man you couldn’t ignore. He didn’t seem like a servant. He seemed like a soldier.

“Just need to make a phone call,” I smiled apologetically, “what do I dial to get out?”

“Phones are down.”

“I need to make a phone call.”

He said nothing, just watched me, with those cold flat snake’s eyes.

“Never mind.” I replaced the phone, tried not to panic. It was all true. I had no proof except my instincts, but I was suddenly horribly sure of it. “Maybe I’ll go for a walk.”

“Not outside,” the man said blandly. “House is sealed off. Security threat.”

“What kind of threat?”

“From Moscow. From Kremlin.”

I stared at him.

“For security we all must remain in house, sir.” His face and voice were utterly expressionless. “Perhaps you should return to your room.”

“Yes.” I could hardly hear myself. I felt like I was falling through the floor towards the molten centre of the earth. “Yes, of course.” There would have been a keylogger and a screen snapper on the computer I had used to chat with Sophie. Now they knew that we knew. Because of me, again.

The well-dressed thug smiled at me politely. Former Russian Special Forces? Maybe. Or maybe a highly trained and deadly FSU agent. Just like Anya Azaryeva.

Chapter 60

I lay on the luxurious bed with its thousand-thread-count sheets and tried to tell myself that this couldn’t really be happening. Anya had not played us like Mata Hari. She and her billionaire uncle – or was he really either? – were not secretly employed by the Russian government to cripple America with thousands of Sophie’s drones. I was not being held under mansion arrest, incommunicado.

I had to tell someone of my suspicions, had to try and get out, or at least to find some way to communicate with the outside world. But there was no way. There were no elegant hacks available to me here, no drones, no computers. Nothing to work with, and no way out.

Wait. No. There was a computer in this room. The iPod Touch on the dresser, the one filled with Jesse’s favourite music. Had he loaded it with his favourite apps, too?

He had. Including WireShark, a tool for breaking into poorly secured wireless networks. There were several Wi-Fi signals within range. They could seal me into this mansion, but they couldn’t keep out London’s dizzying array of wireless networks. And while all were secured, one used the deprecated WEP protocol, vulnerable to WireShark’s predations.

I sat back on the bed, cradling the iPod Touch in my hands, breathing a little easier as WireShark did its thing. All was not yet lost. At least I could communicate.

Once in, I called up GChat and reconnected to Sophie. I had to type with one finger, so her text spilled onto the screen first:

SW: lotek and i have been doing some investigating. last month a shipping container was sent from dubai to one of ortega’s front companies in london. same import/export company has been sending a lot to venezuela, too. hard to be sure, all the paperwork’s in cyrillic, but our guess is ortega outsourced drone manufacturing and chip fabrication to a russian-owned facility in dubai.

I winced at cyrillic and russian-owned. There still wasn’t any hard proof, but the circumstantial evidence was growing mountainous.

JK: we have a major fucking problem.

JK: anya might be one of the bad guys. and she knows about the kill switch, the override code, everything. might have screengrabbed our last conversation too.

The pause that followed was unusually long for Sophie’s Formula 1 mind.

SW: that is doubleplusungood.

JK: i’m in her so-called uncle’s mansion right now, and they’re showing no inclination to let me out.

SW: where’s jesse?

JK: with her. he doesn’t know.

SW: let me think. if so, it’s bad but not yet calamitous, not quite. we still have options. one last hole card. but we have to move fast.

SW: just a sec, someone’s at the door.

I waited. And waited.

And then the little green dot which indicated that she was online went red.

I checked my Internet connection. It was fine. Sophie had abruptly ended our conversation. No: someone had abruptly ended our conversation. It wasn’t something she would have done, not without some kind of valediction.

I had an awful feeling that she wasn’t coming back.

Chapter 61

My frantic preparations took only a few minutes. I left the Fluevogs and wore Asics instead. The Armani jacket in the closet was just big enough. Outside the darkening afternoon was chilly and foggy, which I hoped was sufficient justification for that light coat.

The FSU thug was waiting in the hall when I emerged.

“Can I help you?” His accented voice as bland as before.

“I just wanted to go up to the greenhouse.” I tried to look and sound defeated. It wasn’t hard. “To sit and think.”

He considered a moment, decided it was within the remit of his instructions. “I will show you.”

I didn’t protest that I already knew; I followed meekly, held arms tight against my sides in the elevator. I must have looked squirrelly and uncomfortable, but then I had good reason. Naturally he didn’t take me seriously as a threat or a flight risk. Nobody ever took me seriously. Everybody knew I was just an ordinary guy way out of his depth. I worried he might actually follow me into the greenhouse, in which case my plan would have required drastic and violent revision; but he waited outside, at the base of the stairs that led to the greenhouse’s steel door.

I was sweating heavily even before I stepped into that thick warm air. The rich botanical smell that only a few hours ago had seemed so sweet now made me want to gag. I made my way towards the bench on which Anya, Jesse and I had sat – and stopped halfway, staring out the window towards the circular driveway below, and the limousine pulling into it.

It came to a halt, and Anya emerged, moving briskly. Jesse did not.

There was still no evidence. Maybe I had constructed a paranoid fantasy with no foundation. Maybe she was on our side, Jesse had just stopped for a beer on the way back, there really was a security threat from Moscow, Sophie had been distracted by important breaking news, and that Cyrillic-language factory in Dubai was mere coincidence.

But no. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, I could feel it in my bones. Anya was the enemy. Now that she had confirmed what I had told her, now that the last chink in their armour had been filled, the iron fist had finally emerged from her velvet glove. Jesse had been taken to some kind of prison, and I was next.

I ducked into a corner between two rose bushes, hoping they might shield me from electronic eyes. There I stripped off my jacket, unwound the two king-size sheets wrapped around my chest, and knotted them together, trying to work fast with fumbling hands, wishing I had done this back in the bedroom. I half-expected the thug to race into the greenhouse and knock me out with some Russian martial art before I could put my plan into action.

But he didn’t come. I was hidden from the cameras, or they weren’t watching, or Anya’s return had served as a distraction. Or maybe there were no cameras after all.

I hurried over to the wrought-iron bench, looked up at the four-foot triangular panes that made up the greenhouse wall, selected one. I thought of the raging Colombian river I had crossed with Lisa Reyes, and how she had told me to be confident, to visualize success. Then I crouched down, grabbed the bench, and heaved it all the way into the air.

It was much heavier than I expected, and something gave in my back, it felt like a string snapping beneath my skin, near my spine. I ignored the sudden pain and lumbered at my target, using the bench as a battering ram, half-expecting to either bounce right off or plunge right through.

Instead the brittle glass shattered with a gratifying smash!, and the recoil stopped me dead.

Hot air whooshed out into the foggy day, and cold air began to seep in. It felt like I had torn a hole in the fabric of the universe. Toothy fragments of glass clung to the pane’s triangular steel frame, making the newly created aperture look like a shark’s mouth. I dropped the bench, rushed back to the sheet, grabbed it. Bending over caused agony to race up my damaged back. I hustled back and knelt to tie my improvised rope to the bench.

A door flew open. The thug. The bench was far from that entrance, and the greenhouse’s gravel trails wound indirectly, but I figured I had ten or twenty seconds at most. Panic made my fingers slow and clumsy, like my brain had been transplanted into somebody else’s body and I hadn’t quite figured out yet how to work it. It took me two attempts to tie a simple reef knot. Then I grabbed the sheet, stepped to the edge of the building, and realized I didn’t know how to transition from standing vertically to rappelling horizontally.

I heard pounding footsteps, turned, and saw the thug charging towards me like an unleashed bulldog.

Necessity was the mother of revelation. I scrambled out of the window and suddenly found myself half-rappelling, half-sliding down the side of the building. Blood flowed freely from my left hand, gashed open by a shard of glass. No time to worry about that. It took all my strength to hang on to the knotted sheets as I stumbled backwards – downwards – as fast as I could.

The building’s stone walls were covered with ivy, which gave me good traction; but then I reached a big window. My feet slipped on that smooth glass and I fell, banging my elbow so hard against the window that I nearly let go. Blood dripped from my wounded hand as I gasped for air.

When I looked up,I saw two terrifying things: the FSU thug staring down at me, and the sheet visibly fraying where it sawed against a clinging shard of glass.

I tried to hand-over-hand downwards. A mistake. Without my legs to support me, the twisted sheet began to slip through my hands, and I couldn’t clench hard enough to hold it. I slid down at a pace moderated only by what friction I could impart with my palms. The sheet-burn was agonizing. Then suddenly there was no sheet left, and I was falling towards a large and bristling thorn bush.

It was almost as good as a haystack. Most of its thorns broke or bent or gave way, and it absorbed enough of my impact that I rolled onto the damp earth with nothing worse than a few dozen more nicks and bruises to add to my already-impressive collection. I was on my feet and running before the thug could summon backup.

The London fog was thick, and once on the street I could see no end to the mansions arrayed in either direction. The wrought-iron gate at the end of the road prevented vehicle traffic but allowed pedestrians. The man in the little security cubicle looked like he wanted to stop me, but I was gone before he could react, racing into a public London street where even a billionaire, I hoped, would have to fear the consequences of his actions.

Once the first hit of desperate adrenalin wore off, I slowed to my usual running pace. For a second I flashed back to my run through Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco on the day Lisa Reyes had come to our lab, the day all this madness had begun.

I heard an engine growl behind me, and stiffened with fear, but the Audi that whipped past paid no attention. Past the residential oasis I emerged onto a street thick with shops, buses, pedestrians – and cameras. I knew I didn’t have long before Argus found me.

Chapter 62

I spotted an Oxfam sign. I knew them from previous visits to London; a secondhand charity shop, like Goodwill in the USA. Breathing hard, covered with fresh cuts and bruises, dripping blood from my left hand, I opened their door and walked inside.

“Do you have a phone?” I asked the little old lady behind the counter. “I’ve just been hit a car.”

“Yes,” she said, startled, “yes, of course, are you all right?”

“I don’t know.” I tried to look dazed while surreptitiously surveying the goods on offer.

“I’ll call an ambulance. Sit down. Please.”

“I just, I’m cold, I need to cover up,” I explained, trying to feign delirium as I grabbed a big black hooded sweater. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t exactly feeling fully compos mentis.

“Yes, of course, sir, please, sit, I’ll -“

“I think I’d better walk to stay warm,” I told her, and strode out of the store, leaving her dumbfounded. Once outside I donned my new hoodie and started running again. Even if she didn’t call the police, I needed to get away from Argus.

I zigzagged haphazardly through the streets of London for what felt like a very long time, fuelled by the fear of being prey, trying to alternate between back alleys and huge crowds. I ran until my lungs were burning, and my legs too weak to continue. Then I walked.

Finally I decided that if I hadn’t lost my invisible panopticon pursuers, I never would; so I found a little green square of a park and slumped onto a bench, gasping for breath. Rational thought returned slowly to my brain. I tried to stanch my bleeding hand with the hoodie’s sleeve, and took stock of my situation.

Assets: almost none. Clothing, including a face-hiding hoodie and a decent pair of Asics; knowledge, most of it dangerous, or useless, or both; liberty, probably temporary.

Liabilities: where to begin? Police forces around the globe thought me a mass-murdering terrorist; Anya and the forces of her “billionaire uncle” were doubtless already after me, aided by all of London’s million-strong closed-circuit cameras; Jesse and Sophie were presumably in unfriendly custody; no one else might help me; my wounded hand probably needed stitches, and my back still hurt like hell; and I had no money whatsoever.

Realistically it was only a matter of time, probably only hours, before either the police or the Russians recaptured me. Meanwhile, the fate of the free world arguably rested on my shoulders. I felt like a paraplegic Atlas.

I supposed I could add one item to my Assets list, in a way. I quite literally had nothing left to lose.

With that in mind, when my breath was recovered, I stood and headed for the nearest corner shop labelled FOOD & WINE. A small lineup waited at the cash register. I approached the proprietor directly, and said, “Excuse me, I’m a tourist, new around here, can you just -” before pretending to notice the other customers and demurring, “Never mind, handle them first.”

The grizzled man behind the counter frowned at me, turned to the lead customer, took her money, opened the cash register. Without allowing myself to stop and think about it, I leaned over, reached in, grabbed a fistful of twenty-pound notes, and turned and ran.

I half-expected pursuit, but those present were so shocked that I heard no cry of fury or dismay before the door shut behind me and I was on the street and running again. Pedestrians stared at me curiously but nobody intervened. I stuffed the stolen money in my stolen hoodie’s inner pocket, jinked down a side street, gradually adopted the gait of a man running for fitness rather than his life, and eventually slowed to a sedate walk.

I didn’t even feel guilty. When you are wanted worldwide for crimes against humanity, mere theft seems like a misdemeanour. In a quiet corner I counted my money and found myself with a net worth of two hundred and eighty pounds, which under the circumstances was a million times better than zero. Now that I had money, I had options; and now that I had options, I began to formulate a plan.

Everything that was going on was too much. The putative Russian drone attack on America, whatever had happened to Sophie across the Atlantic – with Jesse and Sophie gone, captured or compromised or whatever, those problems were beyond me. I couldn’t change whether the world as I knew it would survive or collapse. I didn’t play in that league.

But maybe even an ordinary guy like me could do one thing for one person. Maybe I could find my best friend. And if I was lucky, and decisive, and I moved fast, maybe I could even save him.

Chapter 63

I found a London Underground station by following roads towards busier roads, street lights, and larger buildings, until I stumbled across Kensal Green. I was glad I didn’t have to interact with anyone to purchase my fare. En route I had purchased bandages, chocolate bars and a Coke, for my wounded hand and their sugar-rush energy respectively, and the woman who had sold them to me had actually double-taked and backed away from me before reluctantly consummating the transaction. Behind the black hood I must have looked like nine different flavours of hell.

I knew from my post-university European tour that Earl’s Court was riddled with Internet cafes. I found a 24-hour one with semi-private booths and semi-new machines. The Russian-accented immigrant who took my money seemed only slightly nonplussed by my battered and hooded appearance; I supposed places like this attracted all sorts.

Once ensconced, I played my last remaining card, my only valuable asset. I had garnered it only hours earlier, when I had shoulder-surfed as Jesse opened a secure shell connection to the Argus system, and recognized the pattern his fingers formed as they flew over the keyboard. A pattern I knew from high school.

Login: jester

Password: ancalag0n

My plan was simple: use Argus to find what had happened to Jesse. Maybe Anya was still pretending to be his ally and lover – but I doubted it. My disappearance would be hard to explain. I suspected he was now in Russian-controlled accommodations considerably less comfortable than those in Viktor Kharlamov’s mansion.

It took me an hour to master Argus well enough to determine that my plan was doomed to failure.I felt like a fist had emerged from that computer screen and punched. My one card, my sole asset, had been a useless joker. It was not possible to follow what Anya and Jesse had done today because, like a vampire, Anya Azaryeva did not appear on Argus’s cameras at all. Every trace of her had been erased from the system.

Erased.

“Holes,” I muttered.

My degree was in electrical engineering, meaning that I had spent considerable time tracking the flow of electrons through circuits. But sometimes, I had learned at university, it was much easier to reverse the order of things and track holes; not electrons, but their absence.

By cutting herself out of Argus, Anya must have left huge, jagged gaps in its data. Those gaps would be easy to find. I couldn’t watch anything she had done – but I could use her erasure to find everything and everywhere she had been.

I began to assemble and track all the timecode discontinuities in Argus’s records. Then I created a map showing the location of every bit of footage that my opponents had erased, a narrative of negation. It wasn’t easy. The system was designed to track patterns, not absences, so I had to write several new scripts. By the time I finished mapping the non-data it was 3 AM, pain burned in my lower back like a fire in coal mine, and my mind felt deadened by my cranial overdrive, as if all my brain’s crenellations had been ironed flat. But I was still sharp enough to observe how the dead zone in Argus’s sight had moved over the course of the day, and to conclude that on her way back to the mansion Anya had stopped on a street named ‘The Butts’, in the town of Brentford, just west of London proper.

I called up the cameras around The Butts, and looked for changes before and after the erasure of Anya’s visit. It was like one of those Can you spot 20 differences in these two pictures? puzzles. I had never been good at those, but Argus had software to answer that question for me, and it highlighted a parked white van that had changed positions during Anya’s ten-minute visit.

I fast-forwarded the camera in question, until suddenly that white van disappeared in a blur of motion. I rewinded, slowed it down, pressed PLAY. Then I leaned forward until my face was almost touching the computer screen, and repeated it in slow motion.

Two men had carried a carpet out to that van. A carpet? Or Jesse’s body, wrapped in a carpet? And if so, was he alive or dead? It was suddenly hard to breathe, my lungs felt squeezed shut, incapable of taking in air. It had never occurred to me that they might kill him. Surely he was too valuable to them alive. Surely not even Anya was capable of ordering her lover of three years executed as casually as that.

My hands shook as I instructed Argus to track the vehicle in question. It had left Brentford and headed due north, along country roads, wandering in and out of camera coverage, until it reached the very same airfield on which I had landed less than 24 hours ago.

I sagged with a kind of appalled relief. He was alive, but beyond my help, or probably anyone’s. They had flown him out of the country, probably to Russia -

No, they hadn’t. I stiffened with surprise, prompting a bolt of agony in my lower back, as Argus’s tale of the van’s behaviour continued to unspool before me. It did reach the airfield, but the gate was closed and locked. After a brief discussion between driver and gate-guard, the van had turned away and started back south without ever unloading its cargo.

I skimmed the daily record of the airfield cameras. The ability to look back and forth in time, wherever and at whatever I liked, was already becoming almost second nature; those patches between Brentford and the airstrip where the van had been invisible seemed like undesirable aberrations, jagged tears in the smooth fabric of the panopticon. It seemed that all flights had ceased and the airfield had closed around 3PM this afternoon. I wondered why. G8 security? I hoped so. It was about time the bad guys got hoist on their own petard.

The white van had returned to Brentford; the carpet, and its contents, had been carried back into the stately old house on The Butts; and according to Argus, as of fifteen seconds ago, there had been no visible activity since.

I drew the tentative conclusion that I knew where Jesse was.

Now I just had to figure out what to do about it.

Chapter 64

The black cab to Brentford cost me sixty pounds, but time seemed of the essence, and I could steal more money if necessary. The Butts was a cobblestoned thoroughfare in a quiet residential district, lined by big old houses with an air of genteel decay. At 4AM it was postapocalyptically lifeless, which suited me fine.

I stood beside the white van that had driven to and from the airfield and stared over the rusted wrought-iron fence at the house that I believed was Jesse’s prison. The night air was cold and I shivered in my hoodie. I did not feel like a man capable of a successful home invasion. I felt tired and weak and half-crippled and empty.

Various James Bond scenarios played through my brain. In one I broke in through a basement and rescued Jesse without his guards ever knowing. In another I climbed the walls and entered in through a skylight in the roof. In a third I improvised a club, triggered some sort of distraction out front, and brained them when they came out to investigate.

Daydreams all. I was not James Bond, and there was no way I could outfight former Russian Special Forces soldiers in hand-to-and combat, element of surprise or no. I had to try to outthink them, to treat this not as a battle but an engineering problem.

This quiet residential neighbourhood might not be without its advantages. My resources were slender at best; but maybe I could forage for more.

First I hustled to Brentford’s High Street and its 24-hour convenience store. To my surprise they sold cheap prepaid Virgin Mobile cell phones, so I bought one of those, as well as a cigarette lighter and a newspaper, as well from the sleep-deprived Asian man behind the counter. Then I returned to The Butts, and sidled not onto the target property, but the one right next door.

I made my way down the narrow grassy alley between that house and its back yard, squinting and moving gingerly, my hands held high against the semidarkness that revealed only outlines. I had hoped to find a shed, a garden, some tools. Alas, none were apparent, so I forded the fence to the next neighbour over.

The noiseless traversal of chest-high wrought iron was no easy thing for someone in my lacerated condition. It was easy to imagine an insomniacal little old lady calling the police to report the maniac prowling through her garden. I felt a little like I was a maniac, reduced to foraging through strangers’ backyards by some crazed imperative that I could not resist. The imperative in question was necessity rather than madness, but just then the line between the two seemed fine.

Again nothing. I forced myself over another fence, this time barking my shin hard enough that I very nearly cried out, and limped across a third yard.

Success at last: in their little vegetable garden I found a trowel, a garden hose, and a bucket. I used the trowel to hack out a four-foot length of hose, stole the bucket, and returned to the street. There an old Citroen lay parked in the shadow of an oak tree. I opened its gas cap, inserted the hose, put the other end to my mouth, knelt to the pavement, and sucked as hard as I could. For my efforts I was rewarded with a gagging mouthful of gasoline.

I spat it out, filled the bucket from my improvised siphon, and carefully made my way over fences to the yard behind the house in which Jesse was held. It was mostly stone and brick, but it had some wooden joists and a wooden deck. I soaked them as best I could, and hoped it was enough. The eastern sky was growing worryingly luminescent.

I hustled away a safe distance, pulled out my gleaming new cell phone, and dialled 911. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until my third attempt that I remembered that the UK emergency number was 999.

“Listen,” I said, ignoring the responder’s request for my name, pitching my voice to frantic while keeping it quiet, “I need the police, I’m in Brentford, a street called The Butts, I just saw two men beating the shit out of another one and dragging him into their house, I think they’re holding him against his will, I think he’s in serious danger, they were being really violent, it was a really bad scene. Number 8, The Butts. I’m outside there right now, I think I hear screaming inside, you better send police right away.”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said, coolly, “can you please tell us -“

“Oh shit I think they saw me,” I gasped, and hung up.

Trembling with adrenalin, I rushed back to the neighbours’ lawn, all but vaulted their fence, made my way to the house in which I devoutly hoped Jesse was being held, and waited, hoping, praying.

When I heard the oncoming siren it was like seeing a burning bush.

The cigarette lighter caught first time. I lit my rolled Daily Mail and touched it to the gasoline-soaked wood. Flames rose immediately, unexpectedly translucent, and spread like ripples skittering across a pond. Seconds later I had to back away from the intensity of the heat. Then I fled, across the fence yet again; but this time I went the other way, away from The Butts, through another back yard, past another house, onto another street.

This new street crossed a canal before connecting to an arterial road. I threw the cell phone into the water and walked northwards, away from the fire and smoke, as the howling sirens behind me grew in both number and ferocity. I felt certain of success. They might have talked their way past the police, but with the house on fire too, a thorough search by the authorities seemed inevitable; and Jesse, unlike me, was not a wanted man.

When a black cab loomed out of the night I hailed it, and returned to the Net cafe from which my venture had begun. I stank of sweat and gasoline, but neither I nor its proprietor cared. Back in that same semi-private booth I called up Argus once more, and watched London’s police and fire brigade free Jesse and take his captors into handcuffed custody.

I had rarely been so physically miserable, and things had never been so desperate, but it was one of the great moments of my life. I had done something extraordinary, all by myself.

Chapter 65

I emerged from that Internet cafe into the gloomy Earl’s Court morning, and for a moment stood dazed beside a classic red British phone box straight out of Dr. Who, adjusting to the light and the traffic. Early-morning commuters were already making their way to their cubicles. For the first time in my life I envied them.

I had to work out how to contact Jesse, now that all our email accounts had been compromised. First, though, I needed food and caffeine. I was starved, exhausted, and jet-lagged. So much had happened since landing in the UK that it was hard to believe only 24 hours had passed.

Somewhere a telephone rang. In my confused state it took me a good few seconds to realize that it was inside the phone box beside me. The empty phone box beside me.

I started, then walked away quickly, as if it might be demonically possessed. Another phone box, belonging to a different company, stood only twenty paces away. As I passed, it too began to ring.

I stopped and looked around wildly, feeling like a hunted animal. But nobody on the street seemed to be paying me the least attention.

After a long moment I opened the door, entered the box, and answered the ringing phone.

“Mr. Kowalski, I presume?” asked a low British voice.

“Who is this?” I demanded.

“A friend of your favourite court jester.”

“How did you find me?”

“The same way you found him. Which should worry you greatly, because if I can track you, they can too.”

Cold dread began to seep into the pit of my stomach.

“But don’t panic just yet,” the voice reassured me, “they’re not as fast as me. Listen carefully. A red car will stop beside you in about five minutes time. Just before it does, I will crash the entire Argus system. It will take another five minutes to come back up, during which we can disappear you.”

“To where?”

“To safety,” the man said with some exasperation in his voice, “what did you think?”

“I don’t -” I didn’t know what to think. “Who are you?”

“LoTek.”

I inhaled sharply. Suddenly this conversation made a lot more sense. “Oh.”

“Five minutes.” He hung up.

It happened just as he had described. The dreadlocked Rastafarian behind the wheel of the red car with tinted windows drove me to another, identical vehicle, piloted by a woman in a business suit. Neither spoke a word to me. I supposed that was good security. She in turn took me to the parking garage beneath a five-star Meridien hotel.

There Jesse was waiting for me.

“Dude,” he greeted me, and tried to bear-hug me.

I quailed away. “Ow.”

“Oh. Sorry. Come on, let’s get you to the suite.”

I looked at him. He had a black eye but looked otherwise unscathed. Then I looked around the cavernous parking garage. There seemed to be cameras everywhere.

“Don’t worry,” he said, sotto voce. “We own the eyes around here.”

Entering the Meridien was like crossing a dimensional barrier into a different and far better world. Even the elevator was ostentatiously luxurious. It took us directly to the hotel’s enormous penthouse, expensively decorated in black and silver. The transition from homeless fugitive to resident of a luxury hotel suite with a stunning view of central London was so abrupt and profound that I felt dizzy with vertigo, had to sit down hard on the nearest overstuffed suede couch. I was both starving and utterly exhausted.

“Figured we might as well spend what we’ve got,” Jesse mused. “Life is short. As we have both just been viscerally reminded.”

“They’ll be looking for us.”

“We’re off the grid, for now. Temporary invisibility. Enjoy it while you can. Want some breakfast? The room service here is out of this world.”

“Yes, please,” I said, heartfelt. “And a nap. But first, you don’t know what’s going on.”

“So enlighten me.”

I told him about Sophie’s theory: that Russia had used Ortega to smuggle twelve thousand drones into America – the number still seemed unreal – for an attack that would cripple the entire United States.

“Holy fuck,” he said, as awed and horrified as I had been. “Holy fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Well.” He laughed harshly. “At least she didn’t fuck me over for something trivial. What a fucking relief.” It took me a second to realize he meant Anya. “Explains Sophie, too.”

“What about Sophie?”

“According to a Grassfirer on that Afghanistan airbase where they took her, she’s been arrested and imprisoned.”

“Arrested,” I repeated dully. Of course.

“Makes sense. She’s a wild card the Russians didn’t want loose, so they leaked that she was behind all the Axon sales. Now she looks like the evil genius behind Ortega, which is just close enough to the truth to be seriously fucking uncomfortable. I bet she’s finally telling them everything, and I bet they don’t believe a word, and won’t until it’s too late.”

“Dmitri said they had moles inside the US government,” I remembered. “Highly placed, pulling strings. Fuck. Shit.”

“Yeah.” Jesse shook his head, and his mask cracked for a second, and I realized that like me he was running on fumes. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Twelve thousand drones already in place, and no way to stop them. First a decapitation strike, then a fucking disembowelment. With that much pinpoint firepower they can bring the whole country to its knees. Christ Almighty.”

“She said we had options,” I remembered. “Even after I told her Anya had the override code. Sophie said she thought she’d found their drone factory, somewhere in Dubai, and we still had options. One last hole card. But we had to move fast.”

Hope flickered in his eyes. “Options like what?”

“She didn’t say. Probably because they picked that particular moment to beat down her door.”

“Shit. We are so fucked. Everyone is so fucked.”

“Yeah.”

“The G8 starts in three days, and if they nail them they’ll probably hit America right after, when they’re already in maximum disarray. If we can’t stop them, at least we have to warn people. Trouble is, we don’t actually have any fucking proof, and neither of us exactly counts as a reliable source, and if we pop our heads up the Russians will come cut them off. So how do we cry wolf in such a way that we’ll be believed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither. Jesus. Fucking World War Three.” He sat down heavily across from me. “Listen, thanks for getting me out of there. I bet I wouldn’t have enjoyed my visit to the scenic Lubyanka.”

“Yeah.”

“They didn’t interrogate me or anything. They didn’t need to.” I had never heard his voice so hollow. “Anya knows everything already.”

“Yeah,” I said again, inadequately.

He tried and failed to make a joke out of it. “I sure can pick ‘em, eh?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Anyway.” He visibly pulled himself together. “No time for recriminations. This is so fucked up. Options. What did she mean by that? I don’t see any options at all.” He shook his head as if to dislodge a brilliant idea, to no avail. “We need some serious help. There’s some high-level Grassfire people in town, I’ll call them, maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

“Who?”

“LoTek, for one. Maybe he’s got some wild card up his sleeve. And one of our feds came over with the G8 security team, she might have some ideas.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, and swung my legs onto the couch. “I’m just gonna lie down here for a bit.”

There I spiralled down into the black-hole gravity well of sleep. When I next opened my eyes Jesse had somehow morphed into Lisa Reyes.

Chapter 66

“Kowalski,” she said briskly, “did I not specifically tell you to stay out of trouble, last time I saw you?”

I stared at her, uncertain whether I was dreaming or hallucinating, then pinched myself experimentally. It hurt.

“You actually look worse than the last time I saw you,” she went on. “I didn’t think that was even possible.”

As I gaped Jesse walked into my field of vision, accompanied by a man and a woman I didn’t know. “James, meet Keiran and Danielle.” He nodded to Lisa. “I gather you two have already met.”

I stared at him, and then at her again.

“You weren’t the only one keeping secrets,” she admitted, with a tinge of guilt in her voice. “I’ve been part of Grassfire pretty much since it got started. Me investigating Kostopoulos? Not a coincidence.”

I looked up at Jesse, still speechless.

“Up, Maverick! The world awaits!” he declaimed, sounding himself again: cheerful, insouciant, confident that the world revolved around him. But I knew him well enough to know it was only a facade. “And soon it will tremble before us. For you see, we have a cunning plan. You know how they’ve imprisoned Sophie in a maximum-security prison in the heart of a massive US military base in the world’s most dangerous and unstable nation?”

I nodded. Coherent speech still seemed beyond me.

“Well,” Jesse said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to break her out.”

Part 5. Death Spiral

Chapter 67

As Tolstoy might have said, all five-star hotels are the same. This one should have seemed superior – it billed itself as the world’s only seven-star hotel – but our suite’s spacious ultra-luxe interior was not noticeably distinguishable from that of the Meridien in London.

The view, however, was very different. I stood on our balcony and looked down the coastline at the colossal lattice of light, steel and concrete that was Dubai: half ultramodern city, half postmodern arcology. A forest of cranes and construction projects surrounded a dense thicket of skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest, straining into the sky as if it sought to escape earthbound living forever. Further out to sea, the lights of a manmade archipelago protected by a colossal artificial reef gleamed in the night. In the other direction, two artificial peninsulas shaped like palm trees jutted into the ocean, each several kilometres long. It was hard to believe they were real. They looked crudely Photoshopped.

The night air was warm and smelled of the sea. I stepped closer to the edge and looked straight down the vertiginous thousand-foot wall of our hotel, the famous Burj Al-Arab, shaped like a magnificent sail of shining metal and glass, set on its own private island. If I squinted I could see the pair of Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts parked out front.

“Jump!” Lisa suggested, from behind me.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Your Christmas present came.”

I took the card from her hand. It had an embedded chip, a magnetic stripe, and my own face staring out next to the words U.S. ARMY CONTRACTOR.

“Oh, goody,” I said glumly. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to be part of the military-industrial complex.”

According to the card, and also the US passport I had been given in London, my new name was Jason Kasperski. Close enough to my real name that my instinctive reactions shouldn’t raise eyebrows. I wondered how long I would use it. Days? Weeks? Years?

“Come on in,” Lisa said, “you can meet the biohackers.”

“Oh joy.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she put a hand on my shoulder. “You OK?”

“What do you think?” What we were about to do felt like suicidal insanity. I felt like I was strapped into a roller coaster from which no passenger emerged unscathed, as it inched its way up to its first breakneck dive.

“Want to talk about it?”

I sighed, shrugged, pulled myself together, and shook my head. “I’ll be fine. Thanks. I’ll do some deep breathing. Enjoy the moment, right?”

“Right.”

The biohacker twins, Ravi and Ratri, sat in the dining room with Jesse, LoTek, and LoTek’s girlfriend Danielle. They were short and squat. LoTek was a tall man with thinning hair, pale skin and green eyes; Danielle was slim and fit, with short dark hair and traces of crow’s feet.

He had brought the tools of his trade. A nearby mahogany desk was strewn with the carcasses of computers and mobile phones. Metal suitcases yawned open like giant chrome clamshells full of technological accoutrements. LEDs winked on a squat metal box that looked like an unholy cross between a cannon and a small refrigerator. The overall effect amid that seven-star luxury was a bit like Versailles as conquered by Hiro Protagonist.

As we entered the mood was light-hearted and jovial, which seemed incredible, given that we were days from massive planetary disaster and about to declare war on the U.S. military. I supposed the others had a mindset which allowed you to do that sort of thing and keep smiling. Maybe that was part of what made extraordinary people extraordinary. It was harder for me.

Jesse looked up at me. “Looks like everything’s ready. And time’s a-wasting.”

I nodded grimly, and quoted: “If ‘twere done when ‘twere done, then ‘twere well ‘twere done quickly.”

“Everybody got everything?” Danielle asked, in her honey-smooth American voice. “Any last-second second thoughts?”

There was no reply.

“Then let us do this thing.” Jesse stood. H grabbed one of the packs resting on the wall behind him. Lisa and I took the others.

“Don’t do anything crazy,” Danielle warned us. “You’re no good to anyone dead.”

“Luck is for amateurs,” LoTek muttered.

She gave him a long-suffering look.

Lisa and I followed Jesse to the elevator. It descended and opened to the Burj al-Arab’s eight-hundred-foot-high atrium, decorated in marble and solid gold. I did not find it as overwhelming as I had on first acquaintance. I felt queasy, and it was not the elevator’s fault. I felt like we were en route to our doom.

First, though, Sharjah, a satellite city some twenty kilometres north of Dubai. From inside a taxi it seemed little more than an endless smear of steel and concrete. Its cargo airport was a hive of activity, perfumed with jet fuel and soundtracked by howling propellers.

Lisa somehow navigated us through the madness to a battered Russian-built turboprop cargo plane. Its interior was a cave of nicked and dented metal, labelled in faded Cyrillic. Only a table adorned by a samovar relieved the feeling of having been eaten by a steel maw. A small staircase led up to the cockpit, where I caught a glimpse of our pilots, one slight and bearded, the other obese and bald. The propellers sputtered into life and we taxied forward. Some thing or things clanked and rattled loudly beneath my feet as we roared down the runway, but we made it into the air.

“Get some rest!” Lisa shouted to me. “You’ll need it!”

I thought of our first flight together, from California to Colombia. Things seemed to have somehow come full circle. Once again I lay on a mattress made of scavenged life jackets, and once again my thoughts turned to Sophie’s betrayal.

Eventually, somehow, despite that gut-wrenching roller-coaster feeling, I fell asleep. When I woke we were high above Afghanistan.

Chapter 68

“Buckle up,” Lisa said. She had changed into a desert-camouflage uniform that said MARTINEZ and AIR FORCE. “Apparently the local Taliban have mortars, so ground control are requesting all incoming aircraft perform a tactical descent. Better known to the military cognoscenti as a death spiral.”

We strapped ourselves into uncomfortable metal chairs near one of the tiny portholes. From above, Logistics Staging Area Python, the largest military base in Afghanistan, looked like a child’s sandbox full of thousands of military toys. Dozens of helicopters littered the runways; fighter jets, cargo planes, and Predator drones perched in huge igloo-like hangars; rows of gunboats sat inexplicably on arid desert.

I grabbed the bare metal arms of my seat tightly as the Antonov nosed into what felt like a plummeting dive, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane dragged back to level only just in time to land, and we braked so hard that the samovar spilled tea over the barren metal hold.

“Welcome to The Stan,” Lisa said.

“Did you serve here?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Came here once on DEA work. Doesn’t matter. Big bases are pretty much all the same.”

“Like five-star hotels.”

She snorted. “Not exactly.”

I reached down to touch the faux ID card hanging from a lanyard on my chest, as if it was some kind of voodoo-magic mojo. Only it stood between me and instant imprisonment. Lisa got up to work the ramp. Jesse grinned at me, obviously surfing on the same wave of adrenalin that had swamped my mind.

“Well, Maverick,” he said, “once again, here we are.”

“I blame you.”

He nodded complacently. “You always do.”

Sunlight spilled into the hold. The landscape outside was as flat as a pounded pancake, baked mud and gravel and pavement, but with more trees than I had expected. Everything was pale, low-contrast, all colour drained away by the scorching sun. War-torn Afghanistan. If two weeks earlier I had been asked to make a list of all the places I never expected to find myself, it would have been way off the top of the page.

We walked down the ramp to the arrival tent, an forty-foot-square canvas edifice surrounded by sandbags, covered by camouflage netting, and full of bored-looking soldiers in folding chairs. I tried not to betray my tension as Lisa strutted up to the arrivals desk, our order papers in one hand, her ID card in the other. If things were going to go terribly wrong they would start right here and now. But according to LoTek, he had spent years hacking into the US military, he had full access to their ID systems; and according to Lisa, on a base as big as LSA Python, you were who your ID card said you were.

They were both right. As far as the soldiers knew, we were worthy of no particular attention: an Air Force lieutenant and two civilian contractors flown in by one of the private air-cargo companies that serviced the base, just three of the hundreds of people who arrived and departed every day. I started to breathe easier. After all the tension and buildup, this felt like a banal anticlimax. I devoutly hoped it stayed that way.

“OK,” Lisa said to Jesse, after we exited the tent again, “you got more prep to do than us. You know where you’re going? And where to turn up?”

He nodded casually.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” He looked at me. “Later.”

Our customary unceremonious farewell. I nodded. “Later.”

“C’mon,” Lisa said to me as he walked away, “Let’s hit the DFAC. If you’re going to do some kind of insane shit, at least do it with some food in your belly, I always say.”

“DFAC?”

“Dining Facility. Nearest one’s just down Pennsylvania Avenue.” She indicated a main road not far away, thick with Humvees, minibuses, weird armoured military vehicles adorned with.50 caliber machine guns, and huge construction vehicles carrying entire shipping containers with their scorpion-like arm. “Walking distance.”

By which she meant more than a mile. We passed vast segmented tents that looked like giant caterpillars, and whole suburbs of trailers surrounded by sandbags and walled by intermittent rows of concrete barriers. There were soldiers everywhere, on foot or waiting at bus stops. Most carried M-16s and wore helmet and armour despite the blistering sun. None paid us any attention.

The DFAC was a huge cafeteria tent in which sour-looking Sri Lankans served surprisingly good food to anyone with an ID card. I ate scrambled eggs and Frosted Flakes, feeling like a Cold War mole behind American lines, like at any moment someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me the game was up. Afterwards we walked to a shipping container transformed into a Starbucks clone named Green Beans, presumably because the day had henceforth been insufficiently surreal, and drank lattes. Only then did Lisa look at her watch and pronounce our mission ready to begin.

“You sure?” I asked sarcastically. “You don’t want to go shopping at the PX first?”

She gave me a look. “Let’s get going.”

Most people weren’t supposed to know that LSA Python numbered among its features a secret CIA prison. During the Bush administration it had been used to hold and interrogate victims of extraordinary rendition. It had been empty since, until Sophie’s arrest.

Chapter 69

The prison was surrounded by two massive, concentric 20-foot-high segmented concrete walls topped by concertina wire. Two sandbagged gun emplacements watched over its sole entrance. We took up positions on its opposite site, a safe distance away, near a field full of Porta-Potties lined up in neat rows, orienting ourselves by the GPS on the Android phones we had been given in Dubai. It was 10:20 AM. Four minutes to go before the roller coaster that my life had become finally began to plummet straight downwards. Trust Jesse and LoTek to pick a start time that looked like a power of two. I felt dizzy, my muscles twitched, my blood felt slow and thick in my veins. I forced myself to breathe deeply and try to relax.

A faint whine tickled at our eardrums. First one, then another, and then more, raking at our auditory nerves like a distant hornet’s nest, a dissonant and fluctuating chord. An all too familiar sound.

The whining drone that appeared low in the sky was crude and slow compared to the Russians’, and wobbled a little in the desert wind. It flew so low that we saw it only seconds before it dove down to the prison and exploded.

The flash was so bright I saw spots. Then, a fraction of a second later, the dense sound of the explosion rippled through the air: crump! We felt it more than heard it, and I shuddered involuntarily at this sudden violation of the unwritten contract that the fabric of the world must remain steady and inviolate.

Seconds later another drone appeared, plummeted, vanished into a flower of flame with another crump!, this one a little louder, followed by a distant cacophony of shouts. They in turn were drowned out by a howling siren.

We were far away from any soldiers, but we saw them react to the siren: in the distance, in every direction, they ran for safety, stopped their Humvees in the middle of the street and jumped out to rush for cover. The standard red-alert protocol for Taliban mortar attacks. We were counting on it.

The third drone opened up a huge hole in the outer wall. When the dust began to clear we could see, through the shimmering heat, the matching hole in the inner wall, and the featureless concrete block that was the prison proper. A crater full of zigzagging hairline fractures had opened in its side, but its integrity had not yet been compromised.

The fourth drone took care of that. I hoped desperately that our source was right, and Sophie’s cell was underground, on the other side of the building. The fifth flew straight into the massive, jagged aperture in the building and erupted inside. That final explosion was the one that mattered. It was much quieter than the first four.

It had all happened in thirty seconds.

I looked around. There were no soldiers in sight. Lisa already had her gas mask in hand. I had rehearsed putting on my mask while in Dubai, but my hands had lost their fluency, the straps seemed foreign, incomprehensible. For a moment I feared disaster. Then Lisa’s strong fingers were over mine, arranging the mask on my face.

“Come on,” she said, her voice muffled, “move.”

As we dashed for the sundered prison walls we heard a violent and bloodcurdling noise, like the fabric of reality itself being torn. The sound of jets being scrambled. Too little too late.

The holes the drones had opened in the walls were sufficiently massive that we hardly had to scramble over any rubble. We had more explosives with us, to open any blocked passageways, but it wasn’t required, to my relief. Time had never been more of the essence.

The air inside the prison had an odd visual texture, a shimmer like some kind of transparent smoke, warping but not obscuring vision. Men and women in uniforms and civilian garbs lay collapsed in hallways and doorways. They looked dead, but I hoped I knew better.

The first drones had been aimed at an empty corner of the prison. The fifth and final drone had carried homemade nerve gas, courtesy of the twin Grassfire biohackers, much like what the Russians had used against the terrorists who had held a Moscow theatre hostage a decade ago: odorless, almost invisible, it would quickly render unconscious everyone who breathed in even a trace. But guaranteed nonlethal, the twins had assured us.

We raced down a concrete hall, past fallen soldiers and CIA agents. The steel doors at its end were shut. Lisa produced a card, inserted it into the reader, pressed her finger against a scanner. The doors slid open: LoTek’s work again. We dashed down stark passageways, into a stairwell, down a floor, through another secured door. A low siren yodelled relentlessly up above.

We didn’t know exactly where Sophie was, and we didn’t have much time, but we did know she was the prison’s only resident; and despite LoTek’s disavowal of the notion, we got lucky. Sophie lay curled in fetal position on a bunk behind the first door we opened, shivering with terror. The gas hadn’t filtered down to the cells yet.

When I saw her it felt like being struck by lightning.

“Miss Warren,” Lisa said, holding out a third gas mask, “you need to put this on.”

She rolled over, stared at us wide-eyed, half-panicked. “It’s happening,” she hissed. “I told you. The Russians. They didn’t wait for the G8. It’s too late for anything now. It’s started.”

I said, “This from the same woman who’s spent her whole life telling me not to jump to unwarranted conclusions on insufficient evidence.”

Our faces were obscured and our voices muffled by the gas masks, but my words, intonation, and body language were enough: her jaw dropped open and she gaped at me, transfixed by the spear of recognition. “James?”

“Here’s a crazy idea, let’s have the heartwarming reunion after the prison break,” Lisa suggested, and stepped forward to force the gas mask on Sophie. She didn’t resist. She seemed frozen by the shock of my impossible appearance. I couldn’t help but enjoy her reaction a little.

“Come on, clock’s ticking,” Lisa said, draping a lanyard with an ID card over Sophie’s gas-masked head. Her point was punctuated by another distant explosion. “That’s our getaway cover. Move.”

Chapter 70

We exited the prison less than three minutes after we entered. That had always been our only hope: either blink-and-you-miss-it smash-and-grab, or disaster. Between the drones, the nerve gas, LoTek’s hacks, and LSA Python’s red-alert lockdown policy, we just might escape before the US military and/or CIA began to realize that this was not an aerial assault but a prison break. So far everything was going perfectly. I could tell by the way that we hadn’t been shot, blown up, or captured yet.

“Where is everybody?” Sophie asked, through the mask. LSA Python seemed to have been entirely depopulated during our brief interregnum.

“Run,” Lisa said. “Red alert won’t last forever.”

I heard an incoming drone. Sophie started, grabbed Lisa and pulled her backwards.

She shrugged Sophie off angrily. “It’s one of ours, you idiot! Come on!”

She set off at a dead run along the nearest barrier wall. Sophie and I followed. I wondered when anyone had last called Sophie an idiot. Halfway there I glanced over my shoulder, like Lot’s wife, and watched another Grassfire drone dive into a distant empty patch of real estate and explode. The idea was to lure reaction teams elsewhere.

“Come on!” Lisa shouted.

I gave up on gawking and concentrated on running. We continued around the corner of the wall, and I nearly ran into the military ambulance waiting for us, with Jesse behind the wheel. It started moving even before we closed the doors.

“On the stretcher, both of you,” Lisa ordered us, as she peeled off her gas mask. “On your backs.”

I followed orders, as did Sophie, for once in her life too stunned to do anything but obey. Lisa ripped my gas mask off hard enough that I protested at the strap-burn, and replaced it with an oxygen mask. The pure O2 was cold and had strange mouthfeel.

“I need to hook you up,” Lisa muttered, “hang on.”

She had an IV in her hands. We were rattling forward at high speed, and I feared for my veins, but she chose a calm moment and caught a blood vessel with the needle first time out.

“Believe it or not,” Lisa said so softly that only I could hear, her face drawn, “my mom made me help with her needles sometimes.” She shook her head. “Funny what you think of when the shit goes down, isn’t it?”

I said, “I was just thinking a poisoned gas mask would be a really ironic murder weapon.” The oxygen mask muffled my words.

She chuckled, and the pain-lines smoothed from her face. “True dat.”

“Can I ask questions now?” Sophie asked desperately.

“No, shut up.”

Sophie had recovered enough to ignore that command. “Those drones. Grassfire.”

“Not bad for a bunch of hackers from twenty different countries throwing shit together on short notice, huh?” I could hear the grin in Jesse’s voice. “Drones come in, they call in a red alert and get the whole base to hunker down, because they can’t imagine anyone inside might be responsible. You’d be amazed how many warfighters are in Grassfire. Subvert from within.”

“Holy shit.”

“Don’t get too impressed. We’re not out yet. We need to be gone before they clear the alert and start figuring out what happened. Fifteen minutes if we’re lucky.”

The ambulance began to slow down.

“Play almost dead,” Lisa said. “You just got hit by a gas attack. We need to fly you out of here to a specialist facility.”

I nodded, closed my eyes and concentrated on method acting. It wasn’t hard. I had after all spent most of the last two weeks sick and weak with stress, fear, adrenalin and exhaustion.

The ambulance stopped. A voice that sounded like a teenage girl’s asked to see IDs. Lisa plucked mine from my chest.

“We need to get them to Kuwait immediately.” I heard the strain in Jesse’s voice and wondered if it was an act or he was genuinely scared of getting caught. The former, I reassured myself. Jesse was never scared. The world was Jesse’s plaything.

“Sorry, sir,” the girlish voice said briskly. “No one’s allowed onto the flight line. No departures until the alert is cleared. No exceptions.”

Chapter 71

“These people are dying, you understand?” Lisa said sharply. “Every minute counts!”

“Sorry. Orders.”

“Who’s your superior officer?” Jesse demanded.

“Lieutenant Samuelson of -“

“I know Samuelson. Just a second.” I heard a squawk of radio static.

“You can use my phone,” the woman said helpfully.

“No, I can’t. Lines are down. Hello, Doctor? I need to talk to Lieutenant Samuelson, I need clearance to get our patients out of here.”

After a brief moment a warped voice responded, “I’m sorry. Can’t reach him. I can send a runner -“

“That could take twenty minutes! We don’t have time!”

“The lines are down. Most radio too. They hit the comm centre, I think they’re jamming our frequencies too, we’re lucky we’re having this conversation.” It was hard to tell, but I thought the voice had an accent. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just a second.” Jesse’s voice changed, he was talking to the woman again. “Listen. You haven’t gotten clearance because they slammed our comms, but we need to get these patients out of here right now, or they won’t make it. I’m sorry, soldier, but we’re cut off from the chain of command. You have to make a decision, and if you make the wrong one, these people will die.”

A moment later her uncertain voice said, “Let me check the lines.”

“I told you they’re down.”

“Let me check!” And a second later, scared now: “They’re down.”

Lisa said, her voice throbbing with what sounded like real emotion, “Listen. Please. The gas they used, they were at ground zero, we don’t even know what chemical it is yet and it’s eating their lungs like acid. We have to get them to the hyperbaric chamber in Kuwait, stat.”

“Up to you, soldier,” Jesse said grimly. “As your superior officer, I’m telling you your orders have changed. We don’t have time for confirmation. If you stop us here, these people will die.”

A very long moment passed.

“All right,” she decided. “Go ahead.”

I took a deep breath of pure oxygen as we rolled onwards. Then the ambulance stopped. The doors opened. Jesse and Lisa carried out Sophie’s stretcher first, then came back for me, and rolled me up into the battered Antonov plane that had brought us to the base.

“They’ll shoot us down,” Sophie objected, after the ramp closed.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jesse said. “This is a perfectly legitimate flight from a company that’s been running military cargo contracts for ten years. Or at least that’s what their flight-control computers will tell them.” He grinned. “Some people think of the US military as an obstacle. We think of it as a really dangerous but really awesome tool. Like Stormbringer as a Swiss Army knife.”

I had to grab for the wall to steady myself as the airplane rolled forward.

“A tool,” Sophie repeated disbelievingly.

“Are we beginning to see the possibilities here? Leverage, baby, asymmetry, that’s what Grassfire’s all about. Use the enemy’s strength and size against them. Trouble is, you can’t do it too often or they’ll start noticing. Like LoTek says, always be invisible. We’re pushing our luck pretty far here already. But I seriously doubt they’ll shoot us down.”

He was right: we flew off unmolested, and unescorted.

“Where are we going?” Sophie’s voice sounded strained, and not just from the howling engines that made it like trying to converse in a nightclub.

“Dubai.”

“What for?”

“Well, we were sort of hoping you might be able to help us save America and the leaders of the free world from the planet’s first drone army. I mean, since we went to the trouble of busting you out of the CIA jail on the major military base.” His grin seemed force. “Never a dull moment, right? The life of a repo man is always intense.”

Sophie considered. “And the Russians have the override sequence.”

I nodded miserably, feeling three inches tall.

“We have to figure they’ll work out how to defang it real soon,” Jesse said. “If they haven’t already.”

We all stared at Sophie, hoping for a hint of a shred of hope.

“It’s not your fault,” she told me. “They would have gotten it from you the hard way if they had to. At least this way you’re still in one piece.” It was true but didn’t make me feel any better. “Anyways it doesn’t really matter. The Russians are just the beginning of our problems.”

Those were not exactly the magical words I had wished for. “What do you mean by that?”

“Let me rest a little,” she said. “When we get there I’ll explain everything.”

Chapter 72

The UAE immigration officer stamped my Jason Kasperski passport without even looking at it. Minutes later we were in a taxi on an ultramodern highway, sweeping through raw desert back towards the Too-Much-Is-Not-Enough surreal cyberpunk skyline of Dubai, and then the dedicated causeway and private island of the Burj al-Arab. The building and grounds were so clean and perfect that they looked like part of an animated movie.

“This is your foxhole?” Sophie asked.

Jesse smiled. “If you gotta hide, hide in style.”

It seemed absurdly normal to be back; our raid on a military base in Afghanistan had been so intense and hallucinatory that anything else, including this seven-star hotel decorated mostly with solid gold, seemed positively quotidian.

Danielle met us at the door. “Sophia. Long time no see.” There were complicated undercurrents in her voice.

Sophie swallowed hard, her breath rasped in her lungs, I had never seen her so discomfited by anyone before. “Danielle,” she said faintly. “Hi.”

The two of them shook hands uncomfortably.

“If you’re all quite finished with the formal salutations,” LoTek’s acid voice said, “let me just remind you that the G8 meeting starts tomorrow. So I dearly hope your little shopping trip was worth it.” He stepped into the foyer and demanded of Sophie, “Well? Have you a masterstroke to save the day, or are we all well and truly fucked?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” She took a deep breath. “I was wrong about a lot of it. Let me sit down somewhere and I’ll explain.”

We took seats around the round mahogany table in the living room and waited anxiously while she tried to assemble her thoughts into a narrative.

Finally she said to Jesse, “See, I figured Kostopoulos and Colombia were Ortega on his own, I didn’t think you and Anya were connected. But when they asked us to go visit you I was pretty eager, because I’d found out about Grassfire and wanted to see what you were up to. I heard about Kostopoulos from Shadow and Octal. I never imagined we might get attacked in Colombia. In Haiti we just got lucky. Anya must not have known they were grabbing me, or she would have made sure we didn’t get away.”

“Haiti was Ortega on his own initiative,” I said. “Without telling the Russians.”

“Ah. That explains a lot.”

“Maybe to you,” I said bitterly. “Why? Why did you sell Axon to Ortega and everybody else?”

I left unasked: and why in my name, without telling me?

“Because I had to,” she said simply. “Because autonomous drones are an incredibly disruptive and unbelievably dangerous technology. You think what the Russians are doing today is bad? Think ahead. In ten years it’s going to seem quaint. We have to put a leash on drones before it’s too late. When I realized Axon was five years ahead of anyone else, I saw if I could spread it as widely as possible, to as many dangerous and violent groups as possible, lure them all into committing to it as their weapon system of choice, then I could use my leash to round them all up and keep them under control.”

I nodded slowly. She had sought to infect criminals, terrorists, and militaries – while seemingly empowering them – with a deadly next-generation weapon that was secretly a Trojan horse, in order to singlehandedly save the world from the nightmarish future she had foreseen. A scheme of incredible scale and breathtaking arrogance.

“Control,” LoTek repeated. “Which means what exactly when it’s at home?”

“Oversight and authority over all drones and drone technologies, worldwide. There’s no alternative. Otherwise we’ll have anarchy that makes Somalia look like Utopia. Assassinations, wars, atrocities, unstoppable, anonymous, forever.”

A brief silence fell.

Jesse broke it. “Bullshit.” He sounded coldly furious. “‘Oversight and authority’ means ‘tyranny.’ What you call anarchy is liberty as described by fearmongers who can’t stand the notion. Drones are only the great threat if you’re a tyrant. For everyone else, they’re the great equalizer. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about, keeping ultimate power for yourself.”

“I am not!” Sophie objected, equally irate. “You think I’m doing this for me? I am not going to keep the leash. I am going to very publicly turn it over to a small and trustworthy group who will use it only responsibly if they use it at all.”

“Small and trustworthy group. You actually want to create every conspiracy theory’s worst nightmare. A little group of men and women sitting around a baize table somewhere, secretly controlling the world. Only a matter of time before they or their heirs decide to end all dissent forever.”

“Nothing secret. Public knowledge, public oversight, public everything.”

“It doesn’t matter whether people know who their rulers are.” LoTek rasped, unimpressed. “In most fascist states the fascists are only too happy to remind them. What matters is that the knowledge which gives them that power will still be secret.”

“Secret knowledge doesn’t mean you can’t have checks and balances.”

“Yes, it inevitably fucking does,” Jesse protested. “There’d be some crisis, manufactured or not, and they’d get authoritarian, then draconian, then totalitarian. You’d condemn us all to an Orwellian future for the sake of so-called stability.”

“Jesse, you have to put down your libertarian-coloured glasses. It’s a crazy philosophy. It might be nice in theory, but it doesn’t work. You’d condemn us all to bombings and assassinations everywhere, bloody back-and-forth vendetta massacres, a positive feedback loop death-spiralling into total chaos. That’s not liberty. That’s disaster. That’s the tyranny of the violent over the peaceful.”

“Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither.”

“Don’t be an idiot. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about whether it’s a good idea to give away nuclear weapons in Cracker Jack boxes. Because autonomous swarms of drones are no less dangerous.”

I thought they were crazy to be arguing philosophy when the destruction of America was imminent. I also thought Sophie was right. You only had to look at how much trouble today’s drones had caused. The drones of tomorrow would be smaller, sleeker and cheaper, and the subsequent generation deadlier yet. Making that technology available to anyone and everyone, as Jesse wanted, was a recipe for carnage. Much better to leash it. But how?

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Sophie said. “Once the Russians launch, the rest of world will understand how big the dangers are. In the long run it might even help. The only way to construct a new world order is to prove that it’s necessary.”

“A new world order?” Jesse asked, aghast. “You’re going to just let the USA burn, twelve thousand drone attacks, total infrastructure collapse, who knows how many dead, to construct a new world order? What the fuck?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t intend to let them succeed.”

“How exactly are you planning to stop them?”

“Klaatu barada nikto,” she said. “The master control signal.”

Chapter 73

LoTek, Jesse and I said in unison, “What?”

“The back door. The real back door. My leash. I told you about the override in Haiti because it was better than nothing and easy to explain,” Sophie said to me, “but I always knew it might be filtered out. The real back door is that all Axons are built to respond to a particular radio signal. The chip itself is the antenna. Get me a radio transmitter and any Axon drone within range is mine.”

I inhaled sharply. The chip itself is the antenna. “Of course. Of course.”

The laws of physics told us that radio waves induced currents in conducting devices. Computer chips were usually shielded so that only very powerful radiation could actually warp their behaviour – like the leaky power lines which had knocked out that drone in Haiti – but the effects of radio waves on them were still measurable, if minute. Traditional computer chips communicated only via physical inputs and outputs, and had to connect to external antennae to receive wireless signals. That was axiomatic, so obvious that nobody even thought about it.

But neural nets could be trained to react to any kind of signal. Meaning that they could be their own radio antennae.

Jesse and LoTek looked equally stunned. It was one of those brilliant ideas that were both entirely unforeseeable in advance and incredibly obvious in retrospect.

“Sorry,” Lisa said, “I’m not a techie, I’m not sure I’m following.”

“Think of a drone as a cell phone, and the neural net as its SIM card,” Sophie said. “With me so far?” Lisa nodded. “Usually you have to use the cell phone’s built-in antenna to communicate with it. But the bad guys own the antenna, and can filter out your signal. My master control signal bypasses that and gets picked up by the SIM card directly. If the neural net’s in range of my transmitter, I own it, simple as that.”

I remembered what Jesse had said of Sophie: Every system she’s ever built has multiple redundant levels of security. In this case because she had seen all this coming for years. Not this particular disaster, but she had understood that one was inevitable, a logical ramification of increasingly cheap and pervasive drone technology.

Maybe Sophie hadn’t been lying all the times she told me that she was sorry, that she loved me. Maybe she had just thought the stakes were so big that she couldn’t afford to let her feelings for me affect her actions. She had treated me as expendable, used me, deceived me, almost gotten me killed – but all that was almost understandable, if not forgivable, in light of her ultimate intention of rescuing humanity from itself. Megalomaniacal, maybe; but not necessarily wrong.

“What if they shield it?” LoTek asked.

“Their loss. If an Axon is fully shielded against all radio signals, in its own Faraday cage or something, after some time it shuts down.”

“So to stop the Russians,” I said, “we just need to transmit your master control signal across the entire United States and take over all their drones, right?”

Sophie hesitated. “In theory, yes. There’s just one small problem. I tested it on that chip of theirs we recovered in Colombia. And it didn’t work.”

We stared at her.

“They must have inadvertently tweaked it when they redesigned it. That wasn’t supposed to be possible, but… ” Sophie shrugged. “I don’t know. Different substrate, subtle design changes, who knows what happened. Live and learn.”

“Live and learn?” Danielle asked, appalled. “You deliberately distributed incredibly dangerous technology to violent groups all around the world so that you could control them with your leash, then you find out that it doesn’t actually work, and all you can say is ‘live and learn’? My God, it’s been nine years since Kishkinda, haven’t you learned anything?”

“It’s not a showstopper,” Sophie said defensively. “It just means I have to tweak the master control signal to account for the differences. I was already narrowing it down when they arrested me. If they’d only listened to me -” She shook her head, frustrated. “All I need is access to some more of their neural networks. With only one I couldn’t afford to take it apart. Give me half a dozen to play with and I’ll have the new signal in an hour. Or get me their source code and I can do it all in simulation in five minutes.”

“All you need is six of their drones,” LoTek repeated incredulously. “Or their source code. Well, that’s not asking much, is it?”

Sophie grimaced. “I fucked up, OK? I made a mistake. What do you want me to say? I know I’m supposed to be smarter than everyone else, but you know what, maybe sometimes I’m not smart enough.” She said it like she was admitting a war crime. “I’m doing the best I can. What more do you want?”

“A little humility, maybe,” Danielle said quietly. “A little humanity.”

Sophie looked at her mystified, as if she had spoken in a foreign language. “What I need is to fix this bug. We need that more than we need to stop the Russians. What they’re doing is just a single instance of the general drone problem. If I can’t fix it… ” She shook her head as if that alternative was unthinkable. “But I can. Honestly, it’s not that big a deal. The new signal will still be somewhere in the mobile-phone spectrum. Once I work it out we just need to get the Americans to give me control of all the USA’s cell towers, and I’ll take down every drone anywhere in cell coverage. We can still solve this problem. We’ve still got time.”

I shook my head, overcome by hope and awe. No one could ever accuse Sophie of not thinking big.

“And how exactly did you expect to convince the US government to give an escaped fugitive control over the country’s entire cellular network?” Jesse asked.

“The fugitive part wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sophie admitted. “But they’re not going to launch the full-scale attack until the G8 meeting. That’s a test to see if we can stop them. We’ve got days yet.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Lisa said darkly. “What do you think the Russkies are going to do after they find out you got busted out of Iraq? After yammering on to your interrogators about how you knew about a massive imminent drone attack and you thought you could still stop it? They might decide to jump the gun and push the button right away, never mind the G8.”

Sophie’s good cheer visibly wilted over the space of about two seconds.

“No, no, no.” I scrambled for a reason that was wrong. “How would they know?”

Lisa rolled her eyes. “Right. It’s not like we’re talking about a huge international intelligence network with a whole herd of moles inside the US government.”

We sat in silence.

“She’s right,” Jesse said. “If I were them, I might hit America right away, never mind the G8. Figure they take a day to find out what happened and make their decision. We have to be ready for them to launch tomorrow.”

“This is not good.” Sophie looked pale, and utterly aghast, as if she was considering the possibility and ramifications of failure for the first time. I wondered if this was what came of spending your life succeeding effortlessly beyond the wildest dreams of others; hubris and feet of clay when you were finally truly put to the test. “If they launch tomorrow then I need both a corrected control signal and the US cell network tonight. Or I won’t be ready to stop them. This is not good.”

Jesse said, “We might be able to get you that last one for free.”

“Access to the entire US cell network?”

“That’s the one.”

“How?”

Jesse looked over at LoTek.

“What can I tell you,” the living legend said drily, “we hackers have always been fascinated by the notion of free phone calls. It’s practically tradition. So I have plenty of fingers in those cellular pies already. Don’t you?”

Sophie shook her head. “I don’t do that any more.”

“No fooling. P2 really is retired. I never believed it. Well, I’m not. Shouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours to let slip my Trojan horses and ride roughshod over the various US cellular networks. Once we’ve established control I doubt we’ll be able to keep it for more than five minutes, but that’s all the time you’ll need, right?”

Sophie nodded.

“James said you think their factory is here in Dubai, correct? That’s why we came here in the first place.” She nodded again. “So if we can find it and get you some free samples, we’ve still got a shot at nipping this in the bud before it goes all mushroom cloud on us. American cell coverage isn’t universal, but it does cover all populated areas. We won’t stop every drone, but we can downgrade the attack from complete apocalypse to something more like the World Trade Center.”

I started to breathe easier. We still had a chance.

Then LoTek continued, “On one condition.”

Sophie blinked. “Excuse me?”

“This master signal by definition can’t stay secret, not if you broadcast it. So I assume it varies over time, keyed on some variable. Clock time?”

Sophie nodded warily. “It’s complicated, but effectively it changes every thirty-seven minutes.”

“Right. So we better establish something right now. I will give you access to the US cell network if and only if you tell us how to calculate that signal. Right now, unless I’m much mistaken, you’re the only one who knows it, and I’m sorry, but that’s too much power in one person’s hands. Either you trade your algorithm for our access, or we do no business at all.”

“Then America goes down in flames.”

The British hacker shrugged casually. “We both know this is much bigger than that.”

They looked at each other coolly.

Long seconds ticked past.

“Wait, what?” I leaned forward. “We’re talking about a massive military attack here, I don’t even know how many innocent lives, worst-case maybe millions, and you two are having some kind of Mexican standoff over a theoretical philosophical point? Are you both fucking crazy?”

He looked at me like I was an insect who needed swatting. “It’s only a standoff if your girlfriend makes it a standoff, mate.”

Sophie said, “I am not giving you that algorithm. End of story.”

Silence hung in the room for a second.

“I don’t understand,” Lisa said, “why you’re even beginning to argue about not doing everything we can to save as many people as we can -“

“We are,” Jesse interrupted. “But we’re worried about tomorrow as much as today. Imagine another decade of miniaturization and Moore’s Law and material advances and economies of scale. You’ll have drones of all sizes, everywhere, doing everything. Drone militaries, drone-based economies. Sophie here wants all of them using her Axon designs so that her handpicked cabal can control them all. Sooner or later that will inevitably turn into 1984 squared. I’d rather see America go down in flames than our entire future as a species.”

“So would I,” Sophie said sharply. “And this Russian attack is nothing compared to what will happen if anyone and everyone can use drones to kill with anonymity and impunity. That will inevitably turn into Somalia squared. No deal.”

Another silence fell.

“Well. Not much point in looking for that factory, then.” LoTek shut the laptop before him with a decisive end-of-discussion flourish. “Fuck it all. What do you say we order some room service and get raging drunk? Cristal and caviar all round! Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow America burns.”

Chapter 74

“All right, calm down, all of you.” Danielle sounded tired and exasperated, as if she dealt with social eruptions like this more often than anyone should have to. “Everybody take a few deep breaths and a few steps back, OK? Let’s not get lost in any abstract intellectual house of cards.”

“This isn’t abstract,” LoTek argued, “this is the future of humanity -“

“This is the future of humanity,” she said, reaching down to touch her own belly gently. “You’re not talking about abstract lives, you’re talking about our baby’s survival. Do you understand?”

Her normally soft voice had a razor’s edge. Nobody dared to reply.

“The immediate problem,” Danielle resumed, soothing again, “the concrete problem, is that Sophie, you need some of their drones to experiment on. And our best bet is probably their factory. Right?” Sophie nodded. “If you can’t do that, then this whole other dispute is completely theoretical anyways. So why don’t we agree to put it aside until we get to the point where it’s actually relevant to the real world?”

Jesse nodded, and quoted Heinlein: “When faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, and then look at it again.”

“I think the problem is we understand this problem perfectly,” Sophie said.

Danielle rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course. You’re all much too brilliant to even imagine that your ideas might be wrong or incomplete or prematurely conceived.”

“I’m not,” I said cheerfully.

“Me neither,” Lisa added.

Jesse, Sophie and LoTek remained resolutely silent.

“Question authority,” Danielle told them. “Especially when you’re the authority.”

Sophie asked her, “What do you think we should do?”

Silence fell, as if Danielle’s vote might decide the issue.

“First, I want you all to lose the hubris,” she said. “Second, I don’t want anybody killed for the sake of a philosophical principle. I almost hate to say it,” she looked apologetically at her frowning boyfriend, “but I’m on Sophie’s side here.”

His expression tightened. Sophie looked triumphant.

“Which makes the vote two to two,” Lisa mused. She looked at me. “Suppose James and I voted the same way. That would be two-thirds. A supermajority. Would that be good enough for all of you? Would you all agree to abide by that decision?”

The offer hung in the air. None of the three geniuses at the table seemed particularly impressed by it.

“Let’s focus on finding that factory,” Danielle said. “Worry about later later.”

LoTek looked at Sophie. She nodded. He responded with a curt nod of his own, and re-opened his laptop. Lisa and I exchanged a relieved look.

“All right,” Jesse said briskly. “All we know is that there’s a drone factory somewhere in the Jebel Ali free trade zone, south of here between the palm peninsulas. That’s a pretty big haystack.”

“Pretty big factory, too,” Sophie pointed out. “A drone assembly line and a chip fabrication plant? Even with today’s tech you’d need major real estate. We might be able to narrow it down to the largest properties from satellite shots.”

LoTek shook his head. “That zone is full to bursting with huge factories and assembly plants.”

“We could go through public records and see who’s hiding something -“

“Sophia,” he said acidly, “do me the courtesy of imagining I’ve thought about this problem myself once or twice over the last few days. Half of those factories are owned by obscure Asian companies, all of whom are paranoid about industrial espionage. I would have found any obvious red flags already.”

“Then what’s your big idea?” Sophie demanded.

The British hacker shrugged, frustrated. “It was shipping. We know drones go out in containers with false manifests, dressed up as drilling machinery. But before they reach the port they go through several layers of middlemen, few of whom seem to keep their real data online, if they keep it at all. I was going to try to salmon-jump up that chain this week, but in one day? With records written in Arabic or Russian? Not likely. Only so much you can do from behind a laptop.”

“What about your drones?” I asked.

“Fresh out. Used everything we had on this side of the pond breaking you out of Anaconda. Not that I’m starting to regret it or anything.”

Sophie gave him a look. “Don’t do me any favours.”

“That include retroactively? Like that time I decided not to strangle you to death?”

“Wait,” Jesse said, suddenly alert. “They scan the shipping containers how?”

LoTek shrugged. “Bar codes, probably.”

“No. Bar codes are two years ago.” Jesse actually cracked a smile. “You’ve gone all software on us, buddy. Time to come back to the dark side.”

“Hardware is Mulligan’s remit. And dilettante dabblers like you.”

Jesse held his smile, but its cheer withered at that disrespect from an intellectual superior. I supposed it hadn’t happened much in his life. “Specialization is for insects,” he shot back. “Shipping containers use RFIDs now.” Radio frequency identification, pronounced arphids. “If we could get a drone, we could mount an RFID detector and fly it around -“

LoTek cut him off. “First, we don’t have any drones. Second, you couldn’t mount a detector with sufficient range. Third, containers are highly fungible and we don’t know which ones to look for.”

A dejected silence fell.

“Come on,” Sophie said, “it’s a huge fucking factory, there has to be some way to find it.”

But the silence continued unbroken. Nobody seemed to have any more ideas, and the clock was ticking. We had no leads to the factory, and if Jesse was right, the Russians might launch their attack tomorrow.

“Never mind the factory,” Lisa suggested. “What if we lured some drones to us?”

“Might not be a bad idea.” Jesse looked speculatively over at the squat metal box the size of a bedside table with winking LEDs and a flared cannon-like barrel mounted on top, connected to the body by thick metal cables. It looked a bit like a steampunk blunderbuss atop a cyberpunk fridge. “We do have that homemade EMP cannon. Should knock out drones at a hundred metres.”

“And scramble everything else electronic within fifty feet,” LoTek pointed out, “after which it takes two minutes to recharge, during which we’re at the mercy of any follow-up. If we broadcast our location I somehow doubt they’ll be kind enough to send exactly the right number of drones for us to skeet shoot and test. If we put out a honeypot they’ll blow it to smithereens and keep sending more until we’re all dead.”

Danielle said, “They might not even bother with drones. Not long ago a Chechen dissident was murdered in a hotel near the gold market here. By Russian assassins, everyone assumes. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to tell them we’re in town.”

Jesse conceded the point. “Then what?”

Nobody had an answer.

“This ultimately might not be a solvable problem,” LoTek said grimly. “We need more data, we don’t know how to get it, and we don’t have much time.”

I looked at Sophie’s face, hoping for some sign of a brilliant insight. But she didn’t look thoughtful. She looked it was beginning to dawn on her that her whole world, our whole world, might slowly be coming apart.

“Jesus,” Lisa said. “I can’t believe this.”

Nobody said anything.

“Maybe they won’t do it. They’ve just been testing the waters, right? They won’t really want to launch a major military attack. Kill thousands of people and start a war for no good reason.”

LoTek shrugged. “Who knows? It’s the one chance they’ll ever have to knock out and maybe replace the world’s hyperpower, so I wouldn’t bet my life against them taking it. The men who run Russia are as vicious as they come, and risk-takers by nature, you don’t get to the Kremlin without taking a few chances. And who is the US going to declare war on? One of the big problems with drones is that you can’t prove who sent them. I expect there are whole disinformation campaigns ready to point to the Chinese, or the Iranians, or both, as the real masterminds. And that’s if the Americans can get their act together at all. The USA might be the most powerful nation on earth, but it’s not a resilient society. Hit it hard enough and it really might just fall apart.”

I waited for someone to dispute that analysis. Nobody did. Sophie looked like I felt, like she was drowning, lost and helpless. I wondered how many would die if and when the Russians pulled the trigger, on that day – today? tomorrow? – when every cable and pipe and road and grocery store in the USA went dark and empty.

I remembered what Sophie had said after landed in Colombia, that she could guarantee that Michael Kostopoulos wouldn’t be the last victim of a drone. How right she had been.

Michael Kostopoulos.

Michael Kostopoulos.

“Hey,” I said slowly. Everyone looked at me. “Who killed Michael Kostopoulos?”

“Ortega,” Sophie said impatiently. “Let’s get back to -“

“No, he didn’t. I asked when I was there. Dmitri had never even heard of him, and he commanded Ortega’s drones. So who sent the drone that got Kostopoulos?”

The question rippled around the table.

Jesse said, “If it wasn’t Ortega, it must have been the Russians, right? No one else had those drones.”

“Exactly. But why would the Russians murder a DEA agent in Colombia?”

Nobody had an answer.

“Interesting,” Sophie admitted.

“Huh.” LoTek pursed his lips. “Be worth looking into his notes and files, if we could. But we can’t. Even I can’t hack into the DEA’s repository, not overnight.”

“Would it help if you had another DEA agent’s password?” Lisa asked.

He rolled his eyes at her apparent naivete. “Sure, with an in like that it would be easy. But how exactly do you expect us to find -“

Jesse laughed.

“Don’t be too terribly alarmed, Mr. Tek or whatever it is you call yourself,” Lisa said drily, “but I happen to be a DEA agent in good standing. They gave me a badge, a gun, and a login. I never realized that last might be the most dangerous.”

“You’re DEA?” LoTek regarded Lisa as if she had tentacles. “Fucking hell. This Grassfire lark may take some getting used to. I’m not accustomed to having suits on my side.”

“Call me a suit one more time and I won’t be on your side much longer.”

He smiled. “Give me half an hour. That’s all I’ll need.”

Chapter 75

I stood on the balcony and looked down at glittering Dubai. The others were still in the living room, clustered around Jesse and LoTek as they hacked into the DEA, but I needed some space. Everything was happening too fast. The whole world was changing, and I had somehow found myself inside one of the axes on which it turned. If we screwed up, and so far it seemed like we had done nothing but, we would fail not just ourselves but all humanity.

I had asked for an extraordinary life. Now I wanted to give it back.

I heard footsteps approach, recognized their rhythm immediately, winced.

“How are you doing?” Sophie asked softly.

I didn’t look at her. “What do you care?”

“James. That’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” Infuriated, I turned to face her. “You frame me as an arms dealer to terrorists and drug cartels, you destroy my entire life behind my back, you lie to me from the day we met, and you say I’m being unfair to you?”

“I never lied to you.”

The fact that this was probably technically true only heightened my fury.

“I had to,” she said quickly, reading my expression. “The stakes were too high. We’re talking about the future of everything. Where we go as a species. No one was supposed to find out, but if they did, I had to have a cover story, and you were the only possibility.”

“Of course. Yeah, obviously. People like me are expendable. Not you, of course, not with your epic fucking messiah complex.”

“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she said quietly. “I really do. But I had no choice. I couldn’t sit by in Pasadena and do nothing. I love you, James. I never even believed in love until I met you. If I could have sacrificed myself instead of you, I would have. Of course I would have. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that I just couldn’t?”

“So you fed me to the wolves.” I shook my head. “Jesus. You’ve got one funny fucking definition of love.”

“It couldn’t be about just us. I wish it could have been. But I had to worry about more than us, or me, or you. You don’t understand what it’s like. That kind of responsibility. The world on your shoulders.”

I looked straight into her eyes for the first time since her reappearance. “Actually, thanks to you, I now have a pretty fucking good idea. And you know what? I wouldn’t sell my friends out, and I would never, ever, have sold you out, no matter what, no matter what the stakes were, no matter what I saw coming. That’s the difference between you and me.”

She didn’t look particularly chastened. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Meaning you think I’m wrong.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter any more. We can’t roll the clock back. But for what it’s worth, yes, if I have to choose between losing the man I love and saving everyone else, then I have to save everyone else. So do you. So does everyone. It’s our duty. For most people the choice between love and duty is never more than hypothetical, but for people like us, sometimes it’s real.”

“People like you. Homo superior.”

She half-laughed. “I wish I was. But being smart doesn’t make it any easier. I mean people like you and me. People who find ourselves in this kind of crazy situation. I’ve hated myself, I’ve despised myself every step of the way for what I’ve done to you. But I had to. It was necessary. Can’t you see that?”

“Fuck necessary,” I said. “You can justify anything as necessary, if you try. Whatever happened to doing what you think is right?”

Sophie had no answer.

“Excuse me,” Danielle’s cool voice intruded from the door. “Sorry to interrupt. But we think we’ve got something.”

Chapter 76

Our Rolls-Royce rolled across the causeway towards the mainland, driven by a dapper young man named Ahmed who spoke excellent English. I wondered how frankly we could speak in his presence. He didn’t seem to be listening to us, he almost certainly wasn’t a police informant or FSU agent, but paranoia was becoming reflex.

Dubai by night was lit up like the world’s largest Christmas tree. Boulevard Sheikh Zayed, the main drag paralleling the coast, was lined by towering architectural marvels and magnificent monstrosities, and full of badly driven luxury cars, but the industrial district we entered was devoid of any such aesthetic appeal. Grim factories, sprawling warehouses, and mountains of shipping containers contrasted starkly with the barren desert that lay between and beneath the wide roads and huge complexes, as if biding its time before reclaiming its territory.

The factories and assembly plants hummed and churned. We passed converted school buses full of Indian labourers with shadowed faces; barren walls; anonymous compounds; corporate names emblazoned in Arabic and Roman script; a mosque whose elegant mosaics and yearning minarets seemed out of place amid all this industrial ugliness. It felt like driving through an Arabic variant of a classic sci-fi Mars city, like we were in some domed biosphere and all these machines and people were working overtime to keep our atmosphere breathable.

Some months ago, we had learned, a nameless informant had told Michael Kostopoulos that shipping containers full of mysterious equipment were being smuggled from Venezuela to Colombia. He had investigated, tracked these containers back to their port of entry, and connected them to bribes paid to a Venezuelan cabinet minister named Ramirez. That was as far as Kostopoulos got before he was assassinated; but LoTek had connected the bank account from which those bribes had come, via a chain of shell companies and international money transfers, to Greenwood Technologies, which owned the factory that was our destination.

At first glance tit looked impregnable: a huge, squat, featureless building devoid of windows, surrounded by a high chainlink frence topped by barbed wire. Four armed guards patrolled the fence with dogs. A gatehouse by the main entrance was manned by more guards and crested with a pair of video cameras. Bright lights – searchlights, really – illuminated the entire property, and the dozens of cars, vans and buses parked inside the fence.

We instructed Ahmed to drive right around the property twice. While he did so, wearing what seemed to me a polite but incredulous these-people-are-crazy expression, Jesse aimed his Android phone through the open window at the dense mass of the factory, beaming video straight back to LoTek in the Burj al-Arab. This was a recon mission. Our hope was to find some chink in its armour.

We had almost finished our circumnavigation when a big blue dragonfly buzzed through the open window into the Rolls-Royce. I made a halfhearted attempt to shoo it back out, but it took up residence in an upper corner, and I gave up. Jesse closed the window and told Ahmed to stop the car a moment. Ahmed, who behind his discreet mask was clearly both puzzled and curious, pulled over next to the immense construction site across from the Greenwood factory.

“What now?” Lisa asked.

Jesse shrugged. “Wait for LoTek.”

Sophie said, “I’d like to go back and analyze that footage myself.”

“Or, we could get another perspective,” I suggested. Sophie and Jesse looked at me with surprise. I pretended not to notice and craned my neck up at the two huge cranes that loomed above the construction site like origami colossi. “Anybody up for a little climbing?”

They were surprised, I supposed, because historically speaking I was never the one to make suggestions or take the initiative; they were the genius world-beaters, they took the lead. But I was sick of the role of sidekick, and having rescued both of them within the last 48 hours, I suddenly felt much less overawed and intimidated by the thought of taking charge.

Lisa grinned. “Beats sitting here doing nothing.”

Jesse and Sophie exchanged a dubious look. “Maybe later,” she said. “One step at a time. Iterate to a solution.”

He nodded. “We can always come back. No sense risking it now.”

Maybe they were right, but for a moment I wanted to yell at them to shut the fuck up and play along with what I wanted for once. I squelched the impulse violently. The stakes were too high.

We rode back to the Burj al-Arab in silence, except for the faint hum of the dragonfly in the corner. I wondered where it had come from: this was a desert country. We were near the Jebel Ali port, but they weren’t salt-water creatures.

Or were they? Now that I thought of it, we had seen one far offshore of Haiti, too, on board the Ark Royale, just before we were attacked.

…And come to think of it, I had also seen a big blue dragonfly, one very like the one currently resident in the Rolls-Royce, in that schoolroom in Colombia, only moments before the mortar attack began…

I started as if stabbed, as a revolutionary notion was birthed in my mind. “Stop!” I shouted. “Ahmed, stop the car!”

Chapter 77

To his credit he didn’t hesitate, braked us smoothly but quickly to a halt between two big assembly plants guarded by tall chainlink fences. My door was open even before we stopped moving. “Everyone out,” I ordered, “scatter, now!”

Jesse, Lisa and Sophie didn’t dispute or question my claim; my panic convinced them. Ahmed was slower to move. He didn’t understand the urgency, and was probably trained not to leave his vehicle. I solved that problem by opening his door, grabbing him, and physically pulling him out.

“Sir, I must request that you release me,” Ahmed pleaded as I dragged him across the wide road – and as an all too familiar whine began to tickle my eardrums, from directly above us.

His shock was just beginning to turn to anger when a gray blur fell from the sky into the Silver Ghost like a cormorant diving for fish. Death from above.

I threw myself and Ahmed to the ground just in time. We didn’t hear the crash, only the explosion. My eyes were squeezed shut, my whole body was turned away from the blast, but the light was so bright that for a fleeting moment I actually saw the world through my eyelids, like a lightning strike illuminating darkness. The pulse of heat was scalding. The shockwave rattled my bones like dice in a cup.

I got up wobbling and dazed and half-deaf; but I got up, and around me the others did the same, with varying degrees of alacrity, shaken but not broken by the explosion. I smelled my own scalded hair. I was grateful that carbon fibre tended to melt rather than turn to shrapnel, and that the bits of the Rolls-Royce had been driven downwards rather than horizontally.

“Merciful God,” Ahmed said beside me. He must have shouted it for me to hear him. His voice was full of awe and wonder, as if this had been a religious experience rather than an attempted slaughter. I supposed the line was fine.

We reassembled in the middle of the road, not far from the smoking carcass that had once been a luxury automobile. The ground within a thirty-foot radius had been transformed from smooth tarmac and sand into something that looked more like churned mud, pockmarked with bits of Rolls-Royce.

“Everyone OK?” Lisa asked.

We gave our uncertain assent. Sophie looked pale and on the verge of collapse. I reached out and put a steadying hand on her shoulder. It won me a grateful look.

A set of headlights appeared in the distance, coming our way, fast.

“Guys,” I said, “either the Dubai police respond with freaking inhuman speed, or we need to get out of here now.”

I matched action to word, turned and ran. Lisa was right behind me. When I glanced over my shoulder I saw Jesse and Sophie following a little further behind. Ahmed stood where he was, bewildered.

The explosion-harrowed earth acted as a huge speed bump, but wouldn’t buy us enough time to reach an intersection. The chainlink fences that walled both sides of the road extended for hundreds of metres in either direction, and were topped with overhanging strands of barbed wire; but about fifty metres away, some of that wire had wilted. I charged straight for that weak point.

When I reached the fence I leaped up it and climbed. Lisa started behind me, but reached the top first. She avoided the flaccid barbed wire with ease; I teetered dangerously as I negotiated my way past, but reached the horizontal pole atop the fence without getting hooked.

We turned to aid the others. Sophie, unused to bomb attacks and physical exertion, had fallen further behind, and Jesse had slowed to stay with her. They were not yet at the fence when the SUV cleared the patch of mangled pavement and leapt towards us with snarling engine. They had only just begun to climb when it screeched to a halt and men with guns, Slavic men in Arabic robes, emerged.

I was about to throw myself at them from above, to distract them, to give Sophie and Jesse a chance to get away. Then Lisa’s hand pulled me backwards. I fought for balance, lost, fell inside the fence and landed hard on gravel. I cried out from the pain, but it was only contusions, no broken bones. Lisa shimmied down the fence with a rattle and landed beside me.

For a moment all I could see was Sophie’s aghast and terrified face through the chainlink. Then they pulled her and Jesse off the fence, and Lisa yanked me up to my feet and shouted, “Run!”

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.”

“You didn’t really -“

“No. We knew before we got here we might want to make an incursion into the factory once we found it. Helps that most electronics are made in China and India and shipped to Europe via, you guessed it, Dubai. This is the new New York, you know. City that never sleeps. Nexus of the new world.”

“Very poetic,” Lisa said tartly. “Can we get things going now please?”

“They’re on their way already.”

Moments later we began to hear the sirens.

Chapter 80

We knew what was coming but I was still taken aback by the size of the emergency-vehicle motorcade that howled to the front door of Greenwood Technologies: more than a dozen each of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers. The guards at the gatehouse were obviously way out of their depth, faced with the authorities’ storm of swirling lights. Just as obviously, they had been ordered to let no one in under any circumstances. In the voluble standoff that developed it was easy for Lisa and I to walk straight up dressed in our brand-new full-body hazardous-material suits and helmets.

“CNRB Emergency Response,” Lisa said tartly to a policeman at the perimeter.

“We don’t have any -“

“Check my ID.”

He called over a superior officer, who brought a small portable card reader with him, and plugged Lisa’s ID into it. I tried not to be nervous about the fact that the police were Arabic and we were very obviously foreigners. About four-fifths of Dubai’s population was expatriate, after all; and like all civil servants, he would do what his computers told him to do.

LoTek had done his work well. The officer looked puzzled but not suspicious. “CNRB Emergency Response,” he read from her card. “Never heard of you. What is CNRB?”

Lisa said, “Chemical, Nuclear, Radiological, Biological.”

They stared at her aghast. Well, not at her, exactly – our helmet visors were tinted, and our suits bulky enough that they probably only knew she was a woman from her voice – but at the soul-devouring terrors she represented.

“Didn’t they tell you what this was?” I tried to affect harried exasperation. “You better let us in as soon as possible, and stay out of the complex yourselves.”

We were ushered to the gatehouse, where guards had finally allowed the police to enter. People kept their distance from us, as if we might already be contagious, while a stressed-out man in a nice suit spoke into the gatehouse intercom.

There was much for him to be stressed out about. As far as he knew, a fundamentalist Islamic group opposed to Dubai’s liberal attitudes had smuggled a “dirty bomb” full of genetically engineered smallpox and polonium into the Greenwood Technologies factory, one that would render this entire free-trade zone uninhabitable due to radiation, and infest Dubai with aerosolized smallpox likely to kill at least ten per cent of the population before the outbreak could be contained. As we waited I watched the news and rumours spread from policeman to fireman to emergency medical technician, saw bodies stiffen and faces go taut. Fear was even more contagious than smallpox.

Lisa and I were mostly afraid that Dubai’s real CNRB team would turn up, but our cyberspace force was on top of things. We waited stiffly at that gate for ten minutes for the factory to be evacuated. I felt like an extra on a movie set. I had understood that LoTek had spent years infiltrating military and government systems around the world, but I hadn’t really understood the influence he could wield until I stood there, surrounded by forty emergency vehicles, while a massive factory complex was evacuated purely on his say-so. It was suddenly easy to understand how Grassfire had grown so widely and so powerful.

“Here they come,” Lisa muttered under her breath. I heard her through my earpiece; LoTek had wired the three of us into an ongoing conference call.

“See anyone familiar?” LoTek asked.

We had hoped that this evacuation alone might win the battle for us. If they tried to smuggle Sophie and Jesse out, we could use our temporary authority to rescue them and have their abductors arrested. But the people streaming out of the factory were all men, mostly Indian, with a sprinkling of Slavic faces; none were Jesse.

“No,” I said, when the trickle ran dry, as all the evacuees herded into police wagons for quarantine.

“Shit. We’re breaking LoTek’s Law here, big time. You pull a stunt like this, sooner or later people notice, and then they hunt you down, and eventually they find you. Only a matter of time. So kindly do me a favour. Hurry the fuck up.”

I looked at the huge squat slab that was a drone factory. Against its immensity the doors set in its side looked like mouse holes. Sophie, Jesse, and their captors were somewhere inside. Lisa and I had to somehow rescue them before anyone figured out what was really happening. I wished the real police could come in with us, but such was the price of our bioterror subterfuge. I wished we had some kind of weapons. The Russians inside were heavily armed. We had nothing except our false cloak of authority.

“All right,” I said, “let’s go.”

We marched forward towards the drone factory’s open doors.

Chapter 81

A barren hallway led us through a small nest of offices, changing rooms, meeting rooms, a cafeteria. The walls were adorned by punch clocks, a work schedule, a few safety posters, a whiteboard covered with scribbled Hindi. The silence and emptiness were eerie. I felt like I was in a real-life game of Resident Evil and homicidal zombies might attack at any second.

The hallway opened up into a vast and vaulted interior space cluttered with machinery, some the size of a house, all of it arrayed around an assembly line covered with drones in various stages of construction. There were about two dozen workstations. Robotic arms hovered above them, frozen in mid-motion. The air was hot and smelled of metal. Nothing moved, and no one was visible, but I heard the hum of engines and computers in standby mode, ready to erupt into action again. It reminded me of the final scene of The Terminator.

I doubted our quarry was here; the assembly chamber had plenty of nooks and crannies to hide, but no locked doors. From the stacks of boxes and shipping containers at one end of the U-shaped line, to the fully assembled drones opposite, it was all one vast open space.

“Keep moving,” LoTek confirmed.

We followed the finished product into the next room, another cathedral-like chamber with two drone launchers on one side and a catch-net on the other. Quality assurance, I guessed; they tested each drone before moving it on to the next room, another abandoned industrial-sized space, this one full of stacked hexagonal metal cases six feet on a side and three high. They made me think of honey cells in beehives.

I opened one of the cases. Its hinged lid was was easy to manipulate. Inside a finished drone nestled in spongelike foam. For shipping, I supposed. I wondered why hexagons rather than cubes. You could tile a surface with either.

“The elevator?” Lisa asked. A freight elevator occupied one corner.

LoTek said, “Where is it?”

She checked her phone. “Northwest.”

“No. The other way.”

An idea hit, and I tarried a moment, reached down to the drone I had just revealed and opened the three panels in its body. Fuel cell; avionics, including a gleaming golden Axon chip; and payload, packed full of that waxy white substance that looked like Play-Doh.

“Holy shit,” Lisa said.

“Yeah. Loaded for bear.” For safety the electrical connectors were physically disconnected, just like in Mexico, knotted and taped down so that they couldn’t physically reach the detonator. “Makes sense. This way they only have to smuggle the Semtex to one place.” I stood. “Come on.”

Metal stairs led us up to an open door. The hallway beyond ran through another warren of offices before ending at a reinforced double steel doors with rubber seals around their edges. Signs warned that they led to the CLEAN ROOM. Of course: this was a chip fabrication plant, too, where the Axon FPGAs were produced. Integrated circuits could only be manufactured in a strictly controlled environment vacuumed clean of all contaminants.

An intercom hung on the wall. Through windows in the doors we saw the airlock-like space where supplicants who sought to enter the clean room’s hygienic nirvana were scrubbed clean of all dust. White chemical suits like those we wore hung on racks like discarded ghosts.

Through the windows in the doors beyond, I caught a glimpse of a woman’s face, and a bolt of adrenalin shot through me. She vanished an instant later, but even through my visor and two sets of windows, I could not fail to recognize the perfect, heart-shaped face of Anya Azaryeva.

“Jackpot,” I grunted.

Lisa tried the doors. They were locked.

I looked at the intercom. “Think you can talk them out?”

Our plan, inasmuch as we had one, was for Lisa to don her full airs of law-enforcement authority and talk them into fully evacuating the building before she had them arrested. Our only advantage was that as far as they knew we represented the full might and majesty of the United Arab Emirates.

“I can try,” she said, and pushed the intercom button.

A long moment passed. Then the intercom squawked to life, and Dmitri’s filtered voice demanded, “Who is this? What are you doing here?”

“Dubai CNRB Emergency Response,” Lisa said crisply. “We’ve received word of major biological and radiological threat in this building. We need you to evacuate immediately.”

The speaker clicked off, presumably for Dmitri and Anya to converse in private. Then he came back: “There is no threat here. You’ve been given false data. Your systems have been hacked.”

I flinched. That was bad on two levels. They might be able to communicate that suspicion to Dubai authorities, who might start investigating this crisis in more detail; and they might begin to suspect, if they hadn’t already, that Lisa and I were part of the hack.

“Sir, we need you to evacuate this building immediately, for your own safety. That is not a suggestion, that is an order.”

“No, that is a terrible idea.” I twitched at the sound of Anya’s voice. “This clean room is completely sealed from the outside word. If there is a toxic threat, which I do not believe, it can only be in the rest of the building. We would only endanger ourselves by leaving. We’re much safer here than if we evacuate.”

“Ma’am, how many of you are in there?”

“That’s not relevant.”

“Ma’am, I am ordering you to open these doors and let us in.”

Anya’s voice rose. “Even if you are who you say, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We are not leaving here.”

I winced. They suspected we were frauds, they weren’t going to evacuate, they weren’t going to let us in, and it actually wasn’t a bad rationale for staying inside.

“What is this threat?” Anya demanded. “Where did you get your information?”

After a moment Lisa said, “Ma’am, I need to confer with my superiors.”

She switched off the intercom and looked at me, stymied.

“Shit!” LoTek said.

“What?”

“They must have hacked Emirates Telecom too, they masked their phone records, I only just found them. A mobile phone in that factory made a call to Russia not five minutes – shit. They’re making another one now.”

“Stop them!” I demanded.

“I’m trying, the database is screwy, someone’s added some kind of trigger… “

I heard the sound of keys clacking.

“Got it,” he said. “They’re cut off now. But they had a minute. We have to figure they had time to tell their bosses what’s up.”

“They know it’s us,” Lisa said. “Or at least they suspect. We don’t have much time. We have to find a way in.”

We stared at the solid steel doors for a moment.

“You know what we could really use right now?” I asked rhetorically. “Some high explosives and a detonator.”

Chapter 82

Semtex didn’t just look like Play-Doh, it had almost exactly the same consistency. I stuck a wad the size of my fist into the crevice where the double doors met, hoped it wasn’t too much, inserted the detonator, and carefully attached the two wires we had scrounged. I hesitated for a breath before connecting the second. If Lisa had accidentally crossed them at the other end… but she hadn’t.

I followed the wires down the hall and into the office, closed the door behind me, ducked under the desk, and ensured that nothing that might turn into shrapnel was in our line of sight. There wasn’t much space down there and we had to press closely together. Lisa’s lean body was taut and bony against mine. I remembered holding her beside that river in Colombia. She held a bare wire end in each hand. I noticed she had found napkins somewhere and wadded them into earplugs. I stuck my fingers in my ears, opened my mouth wide, and nodded.

The explosion seemed to happen even before the wires made contact.

The whole world felt ripped asunder, as if not just air and matter but the very fabric of the space-time continuum had been torn. Glass and plastic shattered and melted. The desk toppled over – away from us, fortunately. But we were sufficiently shielded, and far enough out of direct harm’s way, that we emerged relatively unscathed from the rubbled office.

The hallway outside had been transformed into a charred and ravaged wind tunnel. Clean rooms were kept at positive air pressure, to keep out contaminants, and the explosion had shattered both sets of doors. Walking up that hallway felt like walking through a hurricane while carrying an anvil.

As we approached the pressure began to equalize and the wind to abate. True to its name, the clean room was devoid of dirt or imperfections. Racks of workstations surrounded the glittering high-tech altar where discs of doped silicon two metres across were transformed into billions of carefully linked transistors by the magic of photolithography, a transubstantiation that had given the world integrated circuits, computers, the Internet – and Sophie’s Axon neural nets.

When we reached the ragged lip of metal that had once been a door I looked around cautiously, half-expecting to be shot at, ready to leap back. I had hoped the explosion might knock out everyone inside, and feared that it might kill them all. Neither had happened. Instead the clean room was empty. On its opposite side, another airlock led to an elevator.

“They’re on the roof.” LoTek’s voice crackled and wobbled; we were at the very limit of the GSM signal. “I’ve got video from their security cameras. Six of them. Sophie, Jesse, Jesse’s psycho ex-girlfriend, and three guys I don’t know.”

“Dmitri,” I guessed, “and two Russian Special Forces types.”

“They’re waiting near the helipad. Draw your own conclusion. It won’t be long before their help is on the way, and-slash-or the Dubai cops figure out they’ve been had. I’m rerouting a whole lot of calls but I can’t keep them from talking forever.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Also,” LoTek added helpfully, “they’ve got guns, and you don’t.”

“Thanks so much,” Lisa said. “Got any bright ideas?”

“You could go up there and hope they surrender on sight.”

“Uh-huh. Any others?”

“If I did I would have told you already. There is a theory that no problem exists which cannot be solved by a sufficient quantity of high explosive, but hostage rescue makes that kind of tricky.”

“Dubai’s police,” I said. “All the money in this place, they must have helicopters too.”

“Sure. But I’ve been doing my best to keep them on the ground. Once Sophie’s in their custody it’ll be tough to get her back. International fugitive and all that.”

“Better the cops than the Russians.”

“True. Shit,” LoTek said.

“What?” I demanded.

“I’m picking up a helicopter heading for the free-trade zone already. Not police. It’ll take probably fifteen minutes to scramble them. This one will be there in ten, maximum. Must be the Russians coming for their prize.”

There was nothing to say to that. I suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if there wasn’t enough air in my biohazard helmet. It took me two attempts to peel it off.

There was nothing we could do. The Russian helicopter would carry them away, unless we could somehow go up and stop them, and we couldn’t. They had guns and wouldn’t hesitate to use them. The only weapon we had was high explosive, useless under the circumstances.

I flung the helmet across the room in frustration. Its slipstream caught a piece of paper, which flew off a desk and floated gingerly down to the ground. Clean-room paper was made of a special material that didn’t flake. A childish corner of my wind wondered, irrelevantly, if you could still fold it into paper airplanes.

Paper airplanes.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey what?” Lisa asked.

“Hey, you moron,” I said, meaning myself, “this is a factory.”

Chapter 83

LoTek patched the video footage from the factory roof to our phones. The helipad was set amid a forest of air-conditioning ducts that looked like huge metallic examples of alien botany. Sophie and Jesse stood handcuffed near the giant X, escorted by two stone-faced thugs holding sleek handguns. Beside them Dmitri and Anya waited tensely.

I remembered Jesse picking cuffs in ten seconds flat to impress girls at parties back in our university days. I wondered if in all the recent mayhem he had had any opportunity to pick up a pick.

The clean-room elevator that had carried them up rose into a turret atop one corner of the concrete roof, right next to the helipad. Our freight elevator ascended to to a similar but larger extrusion about a hundred metres away. I hoped that was too far away for them to shoot with any accuracy.

Once we were inside and ready I pushed the CLOSE button. An engine hummed and the freight elevator’s double doors came together vertically, like the closing of a giant maw, leaving us surrounded by rusting steel lit by a single dim LED bulb. When I pushed UP the world jerked, and I nearly fell. I had to hold down the button to maintain our motion.

“It’s in the zone,” LoTek said, meaning the incoming escape helicopter and the Jebel Ali free-trade zone. “You’ll see it coming.”

Once at our apogee I pushed OPEN just long enough to create a thin horizontal crack. Desert air flowed in as I looked out at the six figures waiting by the helipad, and beyond, the cranes and lights of the construction site across the street, counterlit from below by the shimmering ambience of the emergency vehicles that now surrounded Greenwood Technologies. And beyond that – I squinted. Two of the more distant lights were in motion, approaching. The helicopter.

“OK.” I took a deep breath, and leaned on the OPEN button. “In the words of Jim Morrison, let’s try to set the night on fire.”

As the doors yawned open, the exterior light washed onto the drone launcher we had squeezed into the freight elevator. A drone perched on it, ready for dispatch. Five more hexagonal drone carriers sat stacked in a corner. We had learned that one advantage of hexes versus squares was that they were easier to roll.

Default Axon behaviour, when launched without any programmed objectives, was to rise to a moderate height and circle while waiting for radio commands. That did us no good, so I had popped open those drones’ control panels and used Lisa’s knife to perform brief and savage lobotomies, leaving them with a nervous system but no brain; dumb aircraft that would just fly forward until they hit something and exploded.

When the helicopter was close enough to hear its whopwhopwhop I pushed the START button on the readied drone. Its engine buzzed into life. Lisa, who had claimed the trigger position by virtue of enormously more experience shooting things, aimed it towards the incoming vehicle and made tiny adjustments.

Dmitri turned our way, noticed the open doors of our elevator, and cried some kind of warning. Too late. I couldn’t hear what he shouted; the howl of the drone engine inside the metal-walled elevator was deafening, and the resonating thwong! when Lisa launched it was even worse, like a drum sting at an incredibly loud rock concert.

The drone soared delicately out over the roof and into the night, like a huge paper airplane that happened to have the explosive power of a hundred pounds of TNT. I didn’t bother to follow its trajectory. Either it would hit or it wouldn’t. My job was to ready another drone. I was pulling it free from its hex case when the gunfire began.

I froze when I heard the first shots. Then a bullet ricocheted off the elevator walls with a triple c-c-clang!, and I abandoned the drone in favour of diving prone. Lisa, thinking more clearly than I, jumped over me to the control panel and punched the CLOSE button until the doors narrowed back to a slit.

We peered out. I felt like an archer in a medieval castle. The drone soared straight towards the target – but then the helicopter suddenly pulled back, away from the factory; its pilot must have seen the oncoming drone. The UAV wobbled in the rotor wash but kept going, out to the darkness of the Persian Gulf. I briefly wondered how far it would go. Conceivably it could reach Iran. I hoped it wouldn’t go down in an inhabited area, or start a war.

The Russians by the helipad watched us closely but didn’t advance. I wouldn’t have wanted to charge our improvised drone-crossbow either. The helicopter held its position too. Anya gesticulated angrily, waving at it to come.

“That flew perfectly straight.” Lisa sounded impressed. “But they’re too slow, they’ll see it coming.”

That struck me as a solvable problem. “LoTek,” I said.

“Present.”

“Can you kill the lights?”

“Which lights?” he asked.

“All of them.”

“Give me a minute.”

I used the time to mount the next drone on the launcher. Lisa opened the doors enough to allow it egress. No shots followed; either Dmitri and Anya hadn’t noticed or they were conserving ammunition. The helicopter began to swoop down to the helipad again, coming in low to present less of a target, moving cautiously.

“OK,” LoTek grunted into my ear, and the entire Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone went dark.

It felt almost like the carpet of the world had been snatched out from under me. Only the secondhand swirling lights of the emergency vehicles, and the helicopter’s running lights against the suddenly-dark sky, pierced the sudden all-encompassing darkness. The helicopter halted, hovering just above the construction zone across the street. A mistake: as soon as its lights were stable in the sky, Lisa launched the second drone. Again I winced at the sound.

I held my breath and watched, even though there was nothing to see: the dark gray drone was all but invisible in the night. No wonder they had managed to smuggle twelve thousand of them into the USA.

Then a bright light erupted inside the construction site. For an instant the helicopter was silhouetted in a gorgeous tableau of destruction. The drone had somehow hit one of the cranes, about a hundred feet below where the chopper hovered. It was catapulted violently upwards by the shockwave, and I held my breath, hoping – but its pilot retained control.

As the hot wave of desert air from the explosion washed across my face, the steel of the construction crane gave way, and its top half, including its cab, folded and fell away with an agonizing metal moan. Moments later a resounding crash echoed through the night.

“Stop gawking and get me another drone!” Lisa commanded.

I started out of my reverie and got to work.

“Rotor wash,” she said, disgusted. “Blew it away and down. We can’t get a direct hit with an unguided drone, it’s just not possible.”

“I hate to rush you, but fucking hurry up already, I can only keep the wolves at bay for so long.” LoTek said into our ears. “And I hate to criticize, but maybe a little less of the random explosions and wanton destruction. The emirate of Dubai, like most governments, tends to frown on buildings going boom within its borders.”

“That’s very helpful,” Lisa said tartly, “thanks so much.”

The helicopter circled back towards us, and worse yet, as I mounted the third drone, lights came back on all over the roof. An automatically triggered emergency generator, I supposed.

Then I caught my breath, and thrilled with something like triumph. Only five figures were visible by the helipad. Jesse was missing. He had used the power cut and the distraction of the explosion to get away, he was out there somewhere behind one of the air-conditioning ducts that sprouted like huge metal fungi all across the roof. I was sure he’d picked his handcuffs too.

The helicopter swept back towards us, coming in over the factory this time, low enough that gravel flew up from the roof beneath. Lisa fired the third drone not directly at it, but at a protruding duct nearby. I saw her intent; if it exploded close enough, and at a sufficiently obtuse angle, the resulting shockwave might send the vehicle tumbling to its destruction.

But with the factory lights on, the incoming UAV was all too apparent. The helicopter lifted up and pulled away. Its rotor wash inadvertently knocked the drone off-course and left it drifting helplessly across the roof, flat and low, on course for Iran like our first shot. I winced as I opened the next case. We only had two drones left, and I couldn’t see how either might be used successfully -

“Look,” Lisa said.

A figure sprinted across the roof, racing to intercept the drone before it cleared the factory. Jesse. I watched openmouthed, and tensed when I heard the pop of bullets as they shot at him; but he was too far away, moving too fast.

I thought he wouldn’t make it, thought the drone would escape – but he managed a final Olympic-worthy burst of speed, leapt through the air like Michael Jordan, and caught the UAV in midair just before it flew out of reach. I gasped with terror as he landed stumbling on the very edge of the roof, but he managed to right himself, and ducked behind another duct, carrying the drone with him. Its engine yowled helplessly for a moment; its propeller was built to carry its bird-light body, and Jesse was nearly two hundred pounds of solid muscle. Then he found its OFF button.

It had been a spectacular physical feat but I didn’t see what good it did. The helicopter corrected its course and proceeded towards the landing pad. I mounted a new drone, our third last, and Lisa swivelled the drone launcher to aim it. Not at the helicopter. At the five people waiting for its arrival.

“Wait,” I said, “what are you doing?”

She said grimly, “We can’t let them get away with Sophie. No matter what.”

“What?”

“She’s too dangerous.”

The helicopter slowed into a hover, began to stoop towards the landing pad. Lisa squinted, ready to fire, ready to kill everyone there.

I didn’t even think about what I did next. The thought process that caused me to leap at Lisa, tackle her, and pull her away from the launcher lived somewhere far below consciousness.

I couldn’t tell exactly what happened after that. Something sharp, maybe an elbow, rammed into my gut, and as my breath whoofed out my arm wound up coiling painfully around my own torso instead of hers. Then I tripped on something, possibly her deftly deployed foot, and fell against the elevator wall. My head hit metal. I saw stars, and fell disjointedly to the ground, my limbs temporarily unavailable for command.

Lisa bounced back up to the launcher, ready to fire, to do her duty.

Instead she said, “Holy shit.”

I pulled myself up to one knee in time to see Jesse racing back across the roof, this time towards the launching pad and the descending helicopter, carrying the drone over his shoulder. A panel was open in its side. The payload.

“No,” I breathed.

They were paying attention to us, not him, and the howl of the descending helicopter drowned out his footsteps. He got to within about fifty feet before they finally noticed him, and the Russian thugs started to shoot.

This time they didn’t miss. His whole body convulsed with the kinetic energy of the bullet, and he fell hard. I groaned involuntarily, as if I had been shot myself.

Then I saw Jesse reach out clumsily to the fallen drone beside him. Saw his hands move. Saw him bring two wires together. And saw the patch of roof where he lay blossom instantaneously into red and gold.

The shockwave rattled our freight elevator, knocked the five figures by the landing pad off their feet, and sent the helicopter tumbling. One moment it was airborne, and two seconds later it had disappeared behind the lip of the roof. It caterwauled down to the ground with stunning speed. I heard its crash only dimly through the aural fog left by the explosion.

The smoke began to clear from where Jesse had been. I stared at it disbelievingly. There was nothing left but a ragged crater in the factory roof. It didn’t seem possible that I had just witnessed my best friend’s death.

“James. James!” Lisa said sharply, cutting through my shock. “Stay with me. I’m sorry. But this isn’t over.”

As she spoke, the five figures near the helipad began to stir.

Chapter 84

“You said you’ve got access to their phones?” Lisa demanded.

I stared at her, confused, stunned, still in pain from when she had casually overpowered me. It took me a second to realize she was speaking to LoTek, not me.

“Jesse.” His voice sounded hoarse. “Did he – on the cameras it looked like -“

“He’s dead,” Lisa said brutally. “And you both need to focus now, or it was for nothing. Their phones. You said you had access. Do you or not?”

“Their phones.” He took a rattling breath. “They who?”

“Dmitri and Anya. The Russians on the roof.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Then conference them in,” Lisa said. “It’s time we talked.”

It took thirty seconds for LoTek to remotely activate Dmitri and Anya’s phones and patch them into our ongoing call. Lisa used the time to mount a new drone on the launcher. I didn’t use it for anything at all. I was still in shock. Jesse was dead. I was suddenly living in a world in which my best friend no longer existed. I would never banter with him again in our own private dialect, never open a door and find him unexpectedly on the other side, never call him up despondent and find myself full of cheer within seconds. It didn’t seem possible that such a world could exist. I wanted a rewind button, an escape clause, an ejector switch.

My ears filled with terse Russian in familiar voices.

“Anya,” Lisa said loudly. “Dmitri. Listen up.”

We saw them both twitch with surprise, then reach for their phones.

“Who is that?” Anya asked. Her voice was hoarse.

“It’s us,” I said harshly.

“James? Where are you?”

I had forgotten that they hadn’t yet identified us. “Let me put it this way. I can see you from here.”

They took a second to absorb that, and then Anya began to laugh hollowly, in a way that expressed no mirth whatsoever.

“You’re joking,” Dmitri sounded angry at himself. “We’ve been running from Kowalski for the last twenty minutes?”

He made it sound like they had been treed by a teddy bear. I almost wanted to thank him. His scorn helped transform my grief into fury, and I liked fury a lot better. Fury was eruptive. Fury could be directed outwards. “That’s right, motherfucker,” I snarled, “and you’re all out of places to run.”

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 awful: 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.”

“Shut up,” Lisa told Sophie, “and hurry up.”

“I’m hurrying already.”

“Hurry faster.”

LoTek reported, his voice low and hard, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news, bad news, and worse news.” His voice echoed in my earpiece; that conference call had still not ended. “Good, the American cell network awaits our command. Bad, there’s a roadblock up ahead. Worse, it’s not just the cops we have to worry about. I’m tracking a swarm of six drones coming straight at us from dead ahead. ETA maybe three minutes.”

I went cold.

“Shit,” Lisa said, “shit shit shit, Dmitri and Anya saw the ambulance get away. This is my fault. I should have pulled the fucking trigger.”

LoTek said to Sophie, “The longer we wait, the greater the chance of the cell companies noticing something is wrong and seizing control back.”

“Give me five minutes,” Sophie said, without ceasing to type.

“We don’t have five minutes,” Danielle objected.

“Then we lose.”

I winced.

“All right,” Danielle decided, “let’s try to buy a little time. Everyone hang on. Lisa, James, you know what to do.”

I didn’t, actually, but I didn’t have time to protest, because just then Danielle stomped on the brakes and screeched into a U-turn. Lisa and I had neglected to buckle ourselves in, and we both went tumbling to the floor. I barked my shin painfully against something metal. A dozen car horns howled at us as we bounced over Sheikh Zayed’s raised meridian. Then we were accelerating the other way, pedal to the metal, the engine throbbing beneath us.

I looked up at the thing which had bruised my shin, the electromagnetic pulse cannon, and realized what Danielle had meant.

The faint hornets-nest buzz of an incoming swarm of drones was audible above the engine, and growing louder.

“Lisa,” I said hoarsely, “get the doors.”

Chapter 86

Sheikh Zayed was a gauntlet of cyberpunk towers. In the distance, about three hundred feet up but angled gently down, directly towards us, I saw a line of six shimmering blurs of motion, moving inexorably closer as if drawn to us by gravity. A swarm of drones in perfect and deadly formation.

I had to rock the pulse generator back on its edge to aim its megaphone-like barrel at them. It was incredibly heavy, and I could barely move it. I squatted and balanced it against my torso, gave a brief praise of thanks to the emir of Dubai for ensuring that this road was paved as smooth as a baby’s skin, and realized I needed a third arm to push both buttons while I held the generator angled back.

“Shit,” LoTek said behind me. “I just checked Twitter. The use of the word ‘explosion’ has skyrocketed across the USA in the last two minutes. It’s begun.”

“Lisa!” I called. “Give me a hand.”

From behind me her arms threaded through mine, and her hands hovered over the buttons on either side. It was like a drone launcher, you had to trigger both buttons simultaneously to fire the cannon.

“I can’t see,” Lisa muttered into my ear, “you’ll have to tell me when.”

I nodded. The drones fell towards us, closer and closer. Our police pursuit, who had been distanced somewhat by our unexpected U-turn, grew nearer at almost the same speed. I hoped they didn’t think the giant metal box I was holding propped up was some kind of bomb. Though it was mostly battery, so dense and heavy that if they shot at me their bullets would probably bounce right off.

“I’m almost there,” Sophie shouted, “I’m almost there, don’t do it yet!”

At that Danielle seemed to slow down a little, or else the drones accelerated, or it was just a trick of perception; whatever it was, suddenly they no longer seemed there, they seemed here, and every instinct screamed at me to fire the cannon.

I forced myself to wait. They grew larger as they grew closer. I could see the lead drone’s wings and its whirring propellor.

“Got it!” Sophie called. “Shoot!”

Lisa didn’t move.

“Shoot,” I echoed quietly, and for some reason thought of Jesse.

Lisa’s hands slapped both buttons. The cannon shuddered, and emitted a low ominous buzz, like from a power substation or a giant insect, as the ambulance’s lights and electrical systems went out as if Lisa had flicked their off switch. I saw the rotors of the lead drone slow and stop. It began to drift further behind us, and fall further downwards.

“Get us out of here!” I shouted.

Danielle stood on the accelerator. For an ambulance it had a remarkable kick. We rocketed away while the first three drones in the swarm exploded in quick succession, sending the pursuing police cars tumbling side-over-side, leaving smoking potholes the size of washing machines in Boulevard Sheikh Zayed. The fourth and fifth drones had followed closely enough that they were disabled by the explosions of their peers, veered off course, and tumbled to explode relatively harmlessly against skyscrapers.

The sixth and final drone kept coming.

I looked down at the analog dial. It had swung all the way back down to EMPTY, and was slowly creeping back up through red towards green as the generator recharged. Much too slowly.

As if in slow motion the final drone fell gradually towards us, like an airplane on autopilot, descending the flight path to our fiery death with perfect grace. It was so close that I could see the blur of its propeller in the night. The cannon’s range varied nonlinearly with its power; at half charge it had one-eighth the range of a full charge. The needle reached the one-quarter mark. One-sixty-fourth the range.

A hundred feet away. Seventy. Fifty. Forty. I could see the glint of its nose-spike camera. Thirty feet from us, ten above the road. The LED on its belly flashed red.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” I muttered.

If anyone else said anything, I didn’t hear it. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten. I could feel its rotor wind -

“Now,” I said, and Lisa slapped the buttons, and the generator expelled its weak charge.

The drone didn’t actually shut down, but it faltered, and began to glide downwards. That gave me time to shove the EMP cannon out of the ambulance, and Lisa time to slam shut its doors.

A second later we actually lifted off the ground with the force of the explosion. Our tires spun frantically with no purchase for a long breath. Then we landed, and they grabbed traction, and somehow, heroically, Danielle kept the ambulance from rolling as we squealed and rattled to a halt.

I looked to LoTek and Sophie and saw that their laptops had snow-crashed.

“Oh, shit,” I said, “the pulse -“

“Flash memory is fine unless you aim the cannon right at it,” LoTek said, “we just need to cold boot.”

He matched action to word by ejecting and quickly replacing his laptop’s fuel cell, then doing the same with the phone that served as its Internet tether. Sophie didn’t bother with her computer; she just held out a thumb drive to LoTek.

“The adjusted signal?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“Dead certain.”

Danielle tried to start the ambulance. It wouldn’t.

“I think we’re stuck here,” she said apologetically.

I shook my head in dismay. “The cops will be here any moment. We’re not getting away.”

“Did you ever think we would?” Lisa sounded almost amused.

“Doesn’t matter if we get away as long as we get it done.” LoTek’s laptop and phone had booted. He grabbed the thumb drive from Sophie, plugged it in, started typing. “Let’s hope the attacks have some kind of Gaussian time distribution, and Twitter was just reporting a handful of early arrivals.”

He hit ENTER, stopped, nodded briefly, and sat back. It was so anticlimactic that I wanted to shout at him not to stop.

“Done.” He sounded tentatively satisfied. “Every cellular tower in America is blaring out that signal and shutting down every drone within range.”

“Until the cell companies notice and take back the towers,” Sophie muttered, worried. “Which will be in, what, five minutes? If the drones are launched in remote places with no cell coverage, and they probably are, we might miss half of them.”

I groaned aloud at that thought.

“I took care of that.”

“How?” Sophie asked.

“I just shut down the entire North American power grid,” LoTek said casually. “The cell towers will run on battery power for hours, they’ll be fine, but their owners will be too busy dealing with the blackout to override me. Take a look.”

He showed us his laptop. On screen was a stylized real-time map of American electrical consumption, with the brightness of each city apparently indicating its power usage.The Boston-Atlanta metropolitan axis shone so brilliantly it seemed to threaten to burn out his laptop’s LCD display.

Then, one by one, without any fuss, all the cities started going out.

“Teach you Yankee rebels not to have a resilient infrastructure.” He smiled, pleased with himself. “At least I’m going to be arrested for something suitably epic. The legend of LoTek lives on!”

Danielle rolled her eyes.

“But did it work?” Lisa demanded. “Did we stop them?”

In the silence that followed I heard what sounded like dozens of sirens coming towards us from all directions.

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “We’ll find out if the lights come back on.”

Chapter 87

Our entrance into Dubai’s gleaming new glass-and-steel police station was a full-on perp walk: all four of us in handcuffs, escorted by a crowd of scowling police, while cameras rolled. Our faces were as grim and tense as those of the arresting officers – until we saw the television showing CNN.

We froze to watch, but there was really no need. Even before we saw the story graphic America Attacked!, and heard the robotically pretty anchorwoman report “dozens of attacks that have left hundreds dead” with mechanical gravitas, the mere fact that CNN was still broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters proved that only a handful of swarm attacks had gotten through.

I moaned with physical relief. We all turned to look at each other, grinning so widely you could have counted our molars, and then Lisa whooped, and burst into jubilant laughter, and the rest of us couldn’t help but join in. We cackled like madmen with relief and triumph. The surrounding crowd of police and media stared dumbfounded; they could never have seen such a delighted lot of arrestees. Much later I realized they thought we had been celebrating the hundreds dead, rather than the tens of thousands saved.

It wasn’t until after we had been processed, fingerprinted, and imprisoned in small but comfortable solitary-confinement cells that I thought of Jesse, and how much he would have loved that moment, how amused he would have been to be arrested and jailed for the crime of saving the world.

At that my joy began to wither into ashes. It still didn’t seem possible that the world no longer had Jesse in it. It still felt like at any moment my cell door might slide open and he would be there, cracking jokes and plotting our escape, with his usual all is right with the world, I’m Jesse Ruby and you’re not grin stitched across his face.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t, I was too wired, my heart was still hammering in my chest, the day had been too crazy. My memories of it were already fragmenting into particularly surreal images. The atrium of the Burj al-Arab. The shattered ruins of the Rolls-Royce. The cloud of emergency vehicles outside the factory. When I thought of Jesse sprinting across the roof I groaned involuntarily.

I supposed I would spend the rest of my life in jail, both for things I had done and things that I hadn’t. Just then such a fate seemed not entirely unfair, and not entirely undesirable. I felt empty of all ambition. Camus had written in The Stranger that a man needed the memory of only one day outside prison to be able to live a whole lifetime inside. I thought I knew what he meant. I thought of what Lisa had taught me about enjoying every instant, treating every moment as a gift, even the awful ones, especially the awful ones.

Jesse had never needed to learn that lesson. He had always known it in his bones.

I took long deep breaths, concentrated on the sensation of my lungs filling and emptying, my muscles slowly relaxing, my heart beating slower in my chest, the tears slipping languidly down my cheeks. Slowly the jangle of noise and sharp edges that was my mind began to smooth and grow quiet, and somewhere in its darkness I found sleep.

Chapter 88

I spent the first day of my life in jail waiting for something to happen. I assumed I would at some point be taken away for further processing, for interrogation, for something; but aside from meals delivered through the slot in my door, the outside world made no contact at all.

It took me all of five minutes to explore everything that my new existence had to offer. My cell was tiny, eight feet by six, furnished with a metal bunk, chair, sink, and toilet, all gleaming in the single bright light guarded by steel mesh. The door too was solid steel. A single small window, barred by an iron cross set in foot-deep concrete, revealed three horizontal stripes, golden sand and blue sky separated by a featureless concrete wall. My new jail clothes were ill-fitting and uncomfortably starchy, but I didn’t care. The meals were rice with tasteless sauces. I forced myself to eat, and waited for an interruption that did not come.

I spent the second day of my life in jail trying to prepare for the years to follow. The haunting atonal Islamic call to prayer woke me at dawn. By noon I had accepted that nobody wanted to talk to me. Maybe they were trying to soften me up with a period of solitary confinement. Maybe they had just forgotten about me, distracted by all the bigger fish – Sophie, Lisa, LoTek, Danielle – who had jumped into their net. It didn’t really matter. I managed to while away a good long time just trying to itemize all the charges that might be brought against me by the various nations in which I was wanted. I supposed I would have to grow adept at such mental games, if I was going to spend several decades trapped inside four claustrophobic walls.

Even such a life was precious beyond all reckoning, I told myself. I could have died so often over the last few weeks. I could have singlehandedly condemned the world’s greatest nation to anarchy. After that, treating every remaining moment as a gift, even they were all spent imprisoned for trying to destroy civilization rather than lauded for saving it, seemed like the easiest thing in the world. They could imprison me in a nutshell for fifty years and I would still count myself a king of infinite space.

I did push-ups and sit-ups, telling myself I was commencing a gruelling physical regimen that whatever else happened, I had to stay in shape, a strong mind required a strong body. I lay on the cot and meditated, took deep breaths. I thought about the past. I forced myself not to think about Jesse, or about the future. I had no future. The future didn’t exist. There was only the everlasting present.

On the third morning of my life in jail I woke completely resigned to a life of eternal imprisonment. About an hour later I was released.

Chapter 89

Two Arabic men in dark suits who seemed to scare the daylights out of all the ordinary guards took me to a room where the clothes in which I had been arrested lay in a neat pile, freshly washed and folded. The rest of my possessions, the Android phone and fake passport, were nowhere to be seen.

They wouldn’t tell me what was happening. I got the impression they didn’t know. As I changed, my mind whirled with terrible fates. The death penalty. Extradition to Russia. The last thing I expected was to be marched out of the jail’s front door and simply abandoned there, atop marble steps leading down to a busy street. A street Sophie and Lisa waited in front of a big black limousine.

“What are you,” I said, “what, what… ” My voice trailed off. My stupefaction was beyond words.

“Full pardons for all,” Sophie explained calmly as I descended. “From everyone, for everything. You are no longer wanted by the FBI, or the government of Dubai, or any other authority.”

My mouth worked for a moment before I managed to speak: “I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but why not?”

“Because the Americans have armtwisted everyone into letting us go.”

“Because they found out what we did?”

“They’re still picking through exactly what happened,” she said, “but they’ve wised up enough to realize that going forward they really have no choice but to have me on their side, and pardons were the first part of the price I named. Call it realpolitik.”

I wasn’t sure I liked her regal self-satisfaction. “What were the other parts?”

She smiled. “You’ll see.”

I looked around, dazed by this sudden second chance. Passersby looked at us curiously, as did the police loitering and smoking cigarettes on the steps that led up to the station.

“LoTek and Danielle?” I asked.

“Gone. For now.” She hesitated. “But not before making it clear that they wanted me to share the master control signal with the world. Lest we face inevitable totalitarian dystopia and all that.”

“Are you going to?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I decided maybe I’m not qualified to decide.”

I stared at her. I had never heard Sophie utter a more un-Sophie-like statement.

“Remember when we talked about that two-thirds majority?” she asked. “And if you and Lisa agreed on what we should do, we should do it? I’ve decided that’s fair. That’s why I asked you to stay,” she said to Lisa. “I wanted to hear from you in person before we left.”

I realized by we she meant herself and me.

“So?” she asked. “Should I unleash the drones, give LoTek and everyone else the master control signal, let them find ways to disable it? If you both think I should, I will.”

Lisa and I stared at each other for a second, stunned. My mind was still reeling from this sudden change of circumstances, this unlooked-for second chance at life. Sophie’s pop quiz to determine the future of the planet was too much to process.

“Sure,” Lisa managed, “just drop the fate of the world in our laps like that.”

“It’s a moral decision, not a practical one. You shouldn’t have to ponder it. Just tell me what you think. Should I give up the leash?”

Lisa chewed her lip. I considered.

Then we both said at the same time, unexpectedly, “No.”

I started, and said to Lisa, “I thought you’d say yes. You were in Grassfire.”

“Yeah. And look how bad we almost fucked everything up. What’s your excuse?”

“Better a government you have to watch closely than anarchy beyond any control. Peace, order, and good government, right?” I said, quoting Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “I’ll take that over life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness any day.”

Sophie nodded, satisfied, triumphant. “It’s obvious, really.”

“You think everything’s obvious,” I muttered.

“Not everything. That would be boring beyond belief. Now come on, let’s go home. We’ve got a private jet waiting, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get back to Pasadena. They want us to hurry. There’s been some kind of coup in Moscow. Things are still pretty tense.”

She handed me a passport – a brand-new Canadian passport, in my own name – and nodded to the limousine. Its front windows were open, revealing two sleek, hard-faced white men in suits.

I hesitated. Looked at Lisa.

I hadn’t even thought about what I would do with a second chance. Now that it had arrived, a lightning bolt from the blue, I didn’t know what I wanted I would have to think about that.

But I knew already, in my gut, in my heart, what I didn’t want.

“Not today,” I said.

Sophie twitched. “What?”

“You go ahead. I’m going to stay out here for awhile, I think. Maybe I’ll come back next week.” I licked my lips. My whole mouth felt dry in the parched desert air. “Maybe not. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

“A lot of thinking,” Sophie echoed flatly, disbelievingly.

I looked her straight in the eye, nodded.

For a moment I saw her stunned, aching hurt; then her mask slammed shut over it, and she nodded briskly, all cool business. “I see. Well. All right. Good luck finding yourself, or whatever. What are you going to do for money? I didn’t bring you a credit card or anything. Being as how I thought you were coming back to our home with me.”

“I don’t know.” I considered. “I guess I’ll call -” I nearly said Jesse, and winced – “my sister, get her to Western Union some.”

“I can cover you,” Lisa said, “they gave me my bank card back.”

Sophie looked at her, then at me, incredulously. “Right. Well. You two have a ball. I have work to do. A whole world to change. Stuff like that.”

I nodded.

She took a deep breath, forced a hard smile from her quavering lower lip. “Call me when you can, OK?”

I nodded again, and returned her hug. Then Sophie was in the limousine, and it was pulling away, and I felt another overwhelming sense of relief.

Chapter 90

Lisa and I eyed each other tentatively as the limousine disappeared down the street.

“What do you think?” I asked, not even sure what I meant.

Lisa considered.

“You know what,” she said eventually, “I think I’m sick of chasing bad guys. Sad to say but true. I think I want to go home and buy a house and a dog and a cat and one point five kids.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking the ordinary is starting to sound pretty great myself.”

“But most of all, I think I need a freaking vacation.”

I chuckled. “Join the club.”

We exchanged another wordless look.

Then her lips quirked into a smile, and she said, “You want to go get a beer?”

“A beer? It’s seven in the morning. In an Islamic country. And I think Ramadan just began.”

“C’mon, Kowalski,” Lisa said, “where’s your sense of adventure?”

She arched an eyebrow, grinned, and led the way, into the rising sun. I smiled and followed.

Jon Evans

***