“I’m sorry, Dillon,” Hutch said. He tried to corral his stampeding thoughts. “We’ll come back, I promise.”
The boy slipped into his coat. He looked around, frowning at all the places he didn’t get to explore.
Hutch patted him on the back. “I promise.” He slipped around him and headed for the exit. He’d already started the list of things he had to do when he got home, the computer searches, the phone calls.
FOUR
Brendan Page moved through the building like a big cat through a jungle. At fifty-eight he was as fit and agile as most of the twentysomethings his company sent into the world’s hottest war zones.
Staying that way wasn’t easy. He worked with a nutritionist to calibrate his diet, a physical trainer to mastermind the perfect combination of aerobic and strength exercises, a dancer to help him stay in tune with his body and movements, and experts in the fields of intelligence and memory, because what good was a powerful body without the mind to guide it? To Page, by the time that good night came, it was too late. Dylan Thomas had it right: it was not death but old age at which you should “burn and rave.”
Now, maneuvering through the corridors, he felt everything, sensed everything: the rubber soles pressing lightly on linoleum before receiving his entire weight; the way the lights cast his shadow behind him . . . under him . . . ahead of him as he passed them; the hint of aftershave lingering from his prey’s having been there. A few minutes ago, at most. Without looking, he gently, almost absently, tried each door handle he passed: always locked. He checked his Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol—or TMP—an Outis favorite for its firepower, dependability, and compact size. It was chambered and ready, set to full auto.
He detected a high-pitched whine coming through his headphones, so quiet he could have imagined it. He raised his weapon and tapped it against the helmet. The noise stopped. Remembering the flickering image one of his soldiers had recently experienced, he gave his faceplate a hard crack with the weapon. There—a flash of static across his heads-up display.
One of Page’s companies had developed the helmet. Earlier versions, less laden with technological goodies, had worked perfectly. In fact, thousands of units continued to function well for his soldiers all over the world. But it seemed that each new feature he requested rendered the helmets less reliable.
He didn’t know all that much about how the technology worked; he only knew what he wanted and demanded that his engineers figure out how to pull it off. To Page, war was a business: it had clear objectives; it required certain tools and skills and people to use them effectively. His strengths lay in innovating new tools and skill sets, in conveying his vision and making it contagious, so the smartest minds in the world would rally to make it a reality.
When the tools and skill sets failed, it often resulted in disastrous consequences like those he’d witnessed the other night. But he knew the score: push a technology, a strategy, a human to just beyond the breaking point, then build the infrastructure that supported the improved version. It was the only way he knew to keep advancing.
He continued to move along the hallway, stopping short of a four-way junction. On the map in his heads-up display, the left corridor flashed. He turned left. The direction might prove to be wrong, but the computer was making calculations based on data Page either did not know or could not keep in his head while maintaining a stealthy pursuit. The system had analyzed video and debriefing reports from many of his opponent’s previous battles. It also took into account what Outis knew of the man’s training and experience. In this case, his opponent was a lifelong military commander. He would have been taught, and seen the advantage of, left-hand turns when pursued on foot.
Roughly 80 percent of the population was right-handed, meaning chances were high that a pursuer’s body was also angled that direction. Turning left required the pursuer to swing his weapon and body farther. Even that extra second or two could mean the difference between the quarry getting around the next corner unseen or not. In the absence of contradictory evidence—say, a blood trail or scuff marks heading another way—Page would trust his computer’s advice.
Where are you? he thought. He realized he had whispered the words only when a faint snickering came through his headphones. The voice belonged to his opponent, Col. Ian Bryson, a guy as hard and sharp as an obsidian arrowhead. That famous quote about something either killing you or making you stronger? Ian was the kind of guy Nietzsche had in mind.
Page said, “You’ve got a voice channel open.”
“The better to hear you scream,” Ian said.
Page paused, hoping to hear the sound echoing in the corridor, through a door. He said, “Not this time, my friend. Let’s get on with it.”
“Had enough?”
“Of stalking, yes.”
“All right,” Ian continued. “Next door on the left.”
At the door, the computer told him there was a 19 percent chance his opponent would attempt an ambush immediately upon his entering. If time were an issue, if he had to stop his opponent from killing a hostage, for example, he would have bet on his four-to-one odds and stormed through the door. This time, however, he could be cautious.
He hunkered beside the wall and pushed open the door. No gunfire, no sounds. He pivoted through, kicking the door so it would slam against the far wall. If it did not, he would shoot through it. A quick 180-degree pan of his head allowed the helmet’s optics to find, if it was there to find, the heat signature of even a single finger.
The room was a cavernous warehouse. Crates were stacked to varying heights, forming long canyons between them. Twenty, thirty rows, at least. Mesh-covered lights, hanging from high rafters, failed to dispel the gloom or chase away the deep shadows.
Page ran to a crate and pressed his back against it. He peered around the corner into one of the long canyons. With utter blackness on the other end, it could have extended forever.
The computer flashed a green E in the upper left corner of his display. Two lines appeared explaining why the Enemy possessed the advantage: Steyr = short-range weapon. E = long-range marksmanship. Page imagined getting in a firefight between the wooden walls of crates. His aim would not be as sharp as his opponent’s; his ammo would fall short. He slipped his weapon over his shoulder and put it behind his back. From the same location he withdrew a Parker Hale Model 85 sniper rifle. The deficiency of his previous weapon disappeared from the screen, but the enemy’s marksmanship continued to give him advantage. That wasn’t going to change anytime soon. He had to find another way to turn the tables.
Page darted across the opening and to the next canyon. Straight as a shooting range, he thought. Precisely the venue of Ian’s best advantage. Here Page could never triumph over the former Army Ranger. No, Page preferred close-quarter combat, where his greater agility and confidence gave him the upper fist. He needed to get closer to Ian. As he was trying to figure out a way to do that, the heads-up display suggested a different strategy. Anticipating Page’s discomfort with distances and knowing he’d move closer, Ian—according to the computer—would try to circle around.
Page moved back to the open door and slid behind it. He waited . . . three minutes . . . four.
Patience, he thought. It’s not always balls to the wall . . . unfortunately.
Finally a noise reached the sensitive microphones on his helmet. He watched through the gap in the door as Ian poked his head around the farthest row of crates.
The colonel had taken advantage of retirement, letting his hair—still full and dark at sixty—grow long and shabby, sprouting a mustache and even a soul patch. Ian’s work at Outis was another way for him to let his hair down, as it were. The things he helped do there beat in time with his military heart, propelling the contemporary fighting machine into the future; but the Pentagon would never consider dancing on the razor’s edge the way Outis did. It was much easier to let a private company get its hands dirty.
Ian ran to the next opening, peered down the canyo
n, ran to the next. He disappeared between the crates.
Page moved out from behind the door. He angled toward the opening where Ian had disappeared. His helmet beeped. It displayed an arrow moving from the top of the screen toward the bottom.
Page ducked into the canyon next to the one for which he had been heading. The system indicated Ian would anticipate Page’s move: he was probably returning to wait for him at the head of the canyon. Page moved deeper into the row. He found a place where the wall was a single crate high. He slung his weapon over his shoulder and hoisted himself up. Testing the top for noisiness, he crawled across to the next row.
Ian had his back pressed against a crate, inches from the end of the row. He held a pistol in one hand, a knife in the other.
Page backed away from the edge. He carefully set down his rifle and pulled a pistol from a holster. He shifted it into his left hand and inched forward. Ian was gone.
He heard a sharp inhalation above him. He rolled to see Ian lunging, both hands on the handle of his BFK knife. Page raised his leg, and Ian landed on his boot. Page fired. The first shot tore a chunk out of Ian’s shoulder. The second pierced his neck. The next three caught him in the chest and sent him reeling over the edge of the crate.
Page rose. He holstered his pistol and picked up the rifle. He jumped down from the crate. He straddled Ian’s legs, staring down at the bloody mess. He said, “That was too easy, my friend.”
Ian’s head lifted. He said, “You don’t think it’s over, do you?”
Footsteps pounded against the concrete floor behind Page. He spun in time to see a soldier charging with a bayonet. Page fired, a .308-caliber direct hit that sent the soldier sailing into the shadows.
Page frowned at the smoke drifting from the rifle’s barrel. It formed a perfect circle and drifted away.
Something soft landed behind him. He twirled to see a black-cloaked ninja holding two kamas—short sickles with foot-long blades. The assassin skipped toward Page, blurring the kamas in front of him.
“Okay,” Page said. “That’s more like it.” He flipped his rifle over his shoulder and withdrew a naginata, a long staff with a crescent blade on one end. As Page braced himself, the computer analyzed his opponent’s foot movement, body roll, the angle of each arm, the movement of the eyes.
The ninja attacked.
Perfectly reading his helmet’s tones and the icons flashing on the display inside his face mask, Page moved: he ducked as a kama swung past. He pivoted his leg away as another kama struck the floor where his knee had been. He was about to rise when the computer told him not to. He crouched lower as the two blades crossed overhead. Responding to a tone, he thrust his own weapon, skewering the ninja through the rib cage. Blood geysered out of the man, who dropped his kamas and continued to spasm on Page’s weapon. A choking, gurgling sound issued from his gaping mouth.
Page watched for a few moments, then said, “All right, Ian.”
Ian’s voice came through the headphones: “Thought you wanted to experience the victory of the kill.”
Blood poured from the ninja’s mouth.
Page said, “I got it.”
“Ain’t pretty, is it, Brendan?” Ian said. “Unless you didn’t like the guy.” Ian laughed wickedly.
The ninja’s eyes rolled toward Page’s. More blood, more wet noises.
Ian was challenging him, putting it in his face. Page knew the man’s position: War was hell. Not that it wasn’t sometimes—often—necessary, but it burned hotter when death was easy, impersonal.
Page yanked the naginata out of the ninja. Before the man could fall, he swung the b lade into his neck. The ninja disappeared.
Page unsnapped his chinstrap. The video flicked off. He pulled the helmet over his head, squinting into the darkness of the circular room around him. He wore a skintight bodysuit on which seventy markers allowed 250 cameras to monitor his every movement. They, in turn, placed him in a virtual reality environment, one of many that were preprogrammed and called up at a controller’s whim. The point-of-view of his VR self in that VR environment was then fed back to the heads-up display in his face mask. The controller could introduce millions of details into the viewer’s perspective, from people to objects.
Page’s companies had been experimenting with putting specific people into the VR worlds, as it had done this time, with Ian. Coupled with Behavior Pattern Analysis software that made the computer-drawn people—or avatars—behave the way actual people did, it allowed soldiers to learn to fight opponents before they ever actually faced them in person. The virtual Ian that Page had fought behaved the way the real Ian would have in a similar situation.
Page bent and unsnapped his heavy, ski-type boots. He slipped out of them and stepped off the low pedestal. It was a pad that registered every step, jump, and tiptoe he made. Its resistance-adjusting surface, in tandem with a harness-and-wire system, gave the VR player total freedom of movement, and the feeling of actual movement, without his venturing from the center of the VR room—or “Void,” as it had become known at Outis.
He walked to a wall of additional helmets and other motion-capture gadgets and seated his helmet into a recharging base. He snapped his weapons prop—which, in his VR display, had been a Steyr TMP, Parker Hale rifle, and naginata—into tongs on the wall.
He gazed up at the control room’s window, two stories above the Void’s floor. Ian sat at a control panel, punching buttons and turning knobs. He saw Page looking and flipped a switch that opened an intercom.
“How was it?” Ian said.
“Your avatar flickered a few times. It hesitated when it was over me with the knife.”
“That was a glitch,” Ian said. “I wouldn’t have hesitated.”
“And the eyes still aren’t quite right.” Page rolled his head around, feeling the muscles in his neck flex and pop. He pushed his fists into his lower back and bent over them.
Snatching a cigar holder off a shelf, he withdrew a vintage Davidoff Dom Perignon, a dark brown stick of aromatic Cuban leaf, made before the manufacturer fled Havana for the Dominican. He rolled the cigar under his nose, appreciating the coffee-chocolaty fragrance coming off the wrapper.
“Oh,” he said, catching Ian’s eye again. “Was the rifle smoke your idea? How many programming man-hours did you spend on that one?”
“If you want, we can program smoke rings for you too,” Ian said.
“I’m not laughing, smart guy.” He clipped the foot of the Davidoff and toasted the head over a lighter’s mini-torch. His inability to blow smoke rings, despite burning through a dozen cigars a day, was a company joke—though only Ian dared laugh about it to his face.
The great Brendan Page, he’d say, conqueror of cities, builder of empires, leader of thirty thousand men . . . can’t blow a smoke ring.
Page pulled on the cigar, tasting cedar in the smoke. He glanced up at the empty control room window. He formed his lips into an O and pushed out some smoke. An unformed plume billowed into the room.
Ian strolled past the window.
“Ian!” Page called. He waved the smoke away from his face. Ian nodded at him.
“Let’s go again,” Page said.
“Anyone in mind?”
Page thought about it. “I think it’s time to kick bin Laden’s butt again. Put him on, but give him a couple extra bodyguards this time.”
FIVE
Hutch held the phone away from his ear as the man on the other end laid into him.
“Where do you come off calling me at home?” the man said.
Hutch said, “Okay, forget about Dr. Nichols.” He tapped a notepad on his desk with a pencil. “What about Genjuros? Does that word mean anything to you? I think it’s G-E-N—”
He heard a click and the familiar nothingness that was somehow deeper than silence. “Hello? Dr. Kregel?”
He sighed and dropped the handset onto the cradle, then rocked back in his chair. He gazed at the dry-marker board, the size of a garage door, that hung on one w
all of his home office. It was covered with scribbled notes in a dozen colors. Lines snaked around and through words, suggesting tentative connections. Photographs and articles clipped from newspapers and magazines or photocopied from books were taped here and there along its edges, spreading onto the walls.
One of the papers, partially covered by later additions to the wall, was headlined “The Psychological Effect of War on the Adolescent Mind.” It was written by Dorian Nichols, PhD. A small picture showed a man in glasses and a bow tie.
Hutch tossed the pencil at it. He said, “What is it, doctor? What did you want me to find out?”
A knock came at the door. Laura peered in, smiling. “You’re not talking to yourself, are you?”
“Don’t worry, I don’t listen.” Hutch looked at his watch and realized he’d been holed up for three hours. “Uh . . . I lost track of the time.”
“I kind of got that,” Laura said. She came into the room, carrying two steaming mugs. “I brought you something from my neck of the woods. Nahapi tea.”
“Ah, the good stuff. Supposed to be relaxing, right?”
“It means ‘sit down’ in Cree,” Laura said, picking her way though the clutter on the floor. “It’s supposed to remind you to relax. You look like you can use it.” Her foot struck a pile of magazines. She lurched forward, swayed, kept the tea from sloshing out. She handed him a mug.
Hutch opened his arms, indicating the piles of everything everywhere, the wall of notes and papers. “Welcome to my world,” he said. “My work for almost a year.”
“Your obsession, more like it.” Laura read his face and said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No, you’re probably right.” He took a sip. Vapors carrying hints of flowers and fruit filled his nostrils. “Almost every waking hour.”
Laura walked to the wall. Her eyes roamed over the mass of information.
He fought the compulsion to distract her, to lead her out into the other room where the extent of his preoccupation—he liked that word better—wasn’t so obvious. But he’d told her about it over the phone; it was only fair that she witness the hard-copy version.
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