Chasing Rain

by Brandt Legg

  Sixty-Six

  Chase looked at Wen as if she’d stabbed him. Her admission to being an MSS agent didn’t seem real. He felt as if he were watching his life in a movie—the kind of betrayal that crushes a heart.

  “You? You’re MSS? I, I—” He stuttered the words while his breath remained trapped in his lungs.

  “I’m sorry to say it is true,” she said. “But I left for you.”

  Silence took over the noisy railcar. Chase stood and walked through the cramped space. If he could, he might have left, but there was nowhere to go. Satellites were hunting him, Rong Lo and Franco wanted to kill him. A world with no clue as to the peril it faced needed him to stay, needed him to live, needed him to find a way to stop the storm.

  Wen said nothing, and hardly moved for the three or four minutes while Chase paced and thought.

  “You have to tell me everything,” he finally said, in a tone that conveyed not anger, but desperate love. “The only chance we have to survive this is if you’re completely honest about how the hell you wound up in the MSS and why the hell you’re only telling me now.”

  “I was part of a top-secret section of the Ministry—”

  “The Ministry being?”

  “The Ministry of State Security. The MSS. My division had been set up to make sure China won the AI race. The party leaders deemed AI bigger than the arms race, cold war, or any other past competition.”

  “How did they recruit you?”

  “In China there is little choice. My father was MSS. So was my older sister. They made him bring in his daughters, and . . . When he died, two years ago, I started planning to leave China, but I was afraid of what they would do to my sister.”

  “Why didn’t she leave with you?” Chase asked.

  “She is too scared, and she thinks MSS is okay. She is in a division that deals with foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence, mostly with Russia. It is different for her.”

  Chase remembered that Wen’s mother had died in Wen’s childhood and that she’d been close to her father. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said sincerely.

  “I miss him. He always felt sorry about us.”

  “You and your sister?”

  “No. That I could not be with the man I love.” She caught his eyes and held them a moment. “You just don’t quit the MSS without permission, and it is rarely granted.”

  “Did you try?”

  “Yes, and because of my family’s service, it was under consideration . . . but then everything changed.”

  “What changed?”

  “You showed up.”

  “Wait, you were in the MSS when we met?” He leapt to his feet. “When we fell in love?”

  “Please let me explain,” she said calmly.

  He stared at her for a moment. “Go ahead,” he said, suddenly feeling out of oxygen.

  “I was supposed to follow you.”

  “I was just a student.”

  “Not just a student,” she corrected. “You were a brilliant student, full of promise. The Party knows that it is the students who are making the breakthroughs, that they know where the innovation starts. They set up a program to track all students in the field who might discover the next great thing, who could have a billion dollar idea, and especially anyone they thought would become important in AI.”

  “And then give them an internship,” he said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Why did they choose you? Why did you get assigned to me?”

  “I was the most qualified.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d done it before.”

  “What?”

  “I’d monitored other students, befriended them.”

  “Did you sleep with them?”

  “No!” she snapped back, as if insulted. “That wasn’t part of the job.”

  “Oh, I was just lucky then?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  He laughed. “Yes. Yes, I was.”

  “You were,” she said, hitting him playfully.

  “I really was. I really am.”

  They kissed. Their embrace became an urgent hold, a desperate search for something they shared five years earlier when life seemed simpler, safer. Their quest for a prior innocence morphed to a heated need for immediate passion, and as the dark and noisy railcar rolled down the tracks to an unknown fate, they made love as if they would not see the morning.

  Sixty-Seven

  Wen and Chase had fallen asleep, but the vibration of his phone pulled them back into the rattle and clickity-clack tempo of the train.

  “It’s Flint,” Chase told Wen as he answered.

  “I’m on a scrambler,” Flint began. “I wouldn’t have risked the call, but there’s something you need to know.”

  Chase braced for bad news.

  “Your parents are okay.”

  Chase exhaled a long breath. “Where are they?”

  “Tess Federgreen had them picked up when they got off the plane in Mexico, just before Chinese agents were going to grab them.”

  “So Tess isn’t all bad, after all?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean we can trust her. Her goals aren’t aligned with yours. This time it just worked out that she believed preventing the Chinese from giving you another reason to push a corporate war out of control was better than the alternative.”

  “You talked to Tess, then?”

  “Yeah, she wanted to make sure you knew.”

  “That I owe her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where are my folks?”

  “They’re on their way back to San Francisco. Boone will meet them.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said. Turning away from the phone, he told Wen, “My parents are safe!”

  “Are you safe?” Flint asked, hearing Chase tell Wen and trying to identify the loud background noise.

  “For the moment.”

  “And you found what you were looking for?”

  “Yes, I did. Now we need to get somewhere to hide out for a few years.”

  “Give me an idea where you are and I’ll get on it.”

  Chase told Flint about hopping the train out of Edmonton, and he promised to get back to him with a plan within the hour.

  Rong Lo received an annoying report from MSS agents in Cancún. Prior to the agents being able to apprehend Chase’s parents, they were taken into what appeared to be protective custody by US officials. The agents had watched as they boarded a flight back to San Francisco. Rong Lo knew it would be next to impossible to pick up Chase and Wen’s trail in the wilds of Western Canada. He also believed that’s not where they planned to stay.

  He had one more card to play—actually, three: Chase’s mother, his father, and his brother. They were all in San Francisco, and Rong decided he would personally welcome them all home. He took his best agent with him, leaving the other, along with the Chinese mafia contractors, to continue to work Alberta and British Columbia, just in case.

  They had a plane waiting at the Edmonton Airport, and were back in the air ninety minutes after destroying Franco’s drone. Rong Lo had been working the phones the whole time and had agents heading back to SFO, and another man watching TruNeural in Seattle. Rong Lo had a hunch that Chase and Wen might, sooner or later, end up there.

  Rong was checking in on the Ghost Dragon to see if Wen had accessed the MSS master data base again when he came across a disturbing piece of news. In the past ninety minutes, Chase had been sighted near Baltimore, Maryland, Des Moines, Iowa, and Portland, Oregon. Each report was credible and backed by machine reference, meaning either an AI algorithm had picked him out of surveillance video, or a customs data base had confirmed travel documents. While he was pondering the meaning of such an elaborate scheme to hide his whereabouts, more data poured in. A credit card belonging to Chase had just been used to purchase gasoline in Phoenix, Arizona, and a computer utilizing his login credentials went online four minutes earlier through an IP address outside of Charlottesvil
le, Virginia.

  “Damn him,” Rong said out loud, and then explained the findings to the other MSS agent. “Obviously, Chase could not be in any of these places, but when he actually does turn up somewhere, we won’t know if it’s a real lead!”

  “His file says he’s a genius,” the agent said. “Smart move. Must have a whole network in place.”

  “Just because he’s good at coding, designing systems, computer-whatever, doesn’t mean he’s a good intelligence operative.”

  “But Wen Sung is,” the agent said quietly, regretting his words immediately, realizing they would escalate Rong Lo’s wrath.

  “Wen Sung will make a mistake. Her emotions will distract her from the critical details. She will fail. Chase Malone will fail. And I will destroy them both! Do you understand? We will find them. They will die.”

  Sixty-Eight

  While waiting for Flint's return call, Wen and Chase discussed the three massive challenges they faced: stopping Sliske, destroying the HuumaX CHIP program, and escaping Rong Lo for good. For days, Chase had been wrestling with a way to destroy his creation—RAI—and thousands of ideas had churned in his mind. But in the darkness of the railcar, while listening to the rhythmic banging, the answer finally clicked. He pulled out his laptop and began frantically coding, trying not to forget the threads of his solution.

  At the same time, Wen worked on the Antimatter Machine, searching for a way out of the Rong Lo problem. It didn’t matter what method, Wen had to find a way to make them both totally invisible. She had sent data contained on flash drives from Port Hardy to four trusted members of The Cause. It would be the only chance to derail HuumaX. The effort, even if successful, would not be enough to permanently halt their CHIP program, but it would buy time. “Time is more precious than anything,” Wen whispered out loud to herself.

  “Did you say something?” Chase asked without his fingers pausing for even a blink. They continued to dance across the keyboard, turning patterns from his mind into actionable code.

  Instead of repeating her thoughts about time, Wen explained to him how far HuumaX had progressed and linked the ten hard drives she’d brought from China to the Antimatter Machine. Chase scanned the massive data and, with Wen’s help, quickly indexed and searched the trove until he found something that startled him.

  Chase told Wen about SEER. “The acronym is for Search Entire Existence Result. We call it SEER. It’s a simulator that essentially predicts the future.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that is far more important—more valuable than RAI,” she said. “Do you know how many people would kill for a program like that?”

  “Of course I do, that’s why I’ve kept it secret. You’re only the fifth person other than me to knows it exists—Dez, Boone, Mars, Adya, and now you.

  Wen’s eyes brightened. “Thank you,” she said, realizing that him sharing his greatest secret with her meant that he believed she truly loved him, that she had not betrayed him, and that they would live and die together.

  He smiled, holding her gaze, then plowed back into the crisis. “SEER can be used for minor predictive purposes, but I designed it for grand scale problems—curing cancer, ending poverty, reversing climate change, etcetera, so I always knew it had to be kept under wraps. But ever since we uncovered Sliske’s RAI+N scheme, I’ve realized that if SEER fell into the hands of someone with nefarious intent, then game over.”

  Wen explained the Ghost Dragon—the Chinese MSS mass database—to him and how she’d used it to upload corrupt malware when she was on Port Hardy Island. “If the NSA and MSS don’t find it before it does its work, your and my profiles will be wiped from the MSS systems.”

  “All of them?”

  “A complete scrub,” she said.

  “But Rong Lo and other agents must know . . . ”

  “It’s compartmentalized. And remember, Rong Lo is rogue. He does not have full authorization for his actions, but you are correct—as long as Rong Lo is alive, we will be running.”

  A short silence between them enhanced the hypnotic sounds and motion of the train.

  “Then we’ll have to turn this around. We have to hunt Rong Lo down and . . . ”

  Wen finished his sentence. “Kill him.”

  Chase nodded. “But won’t other MSS keep coming?”

  “Not necessarily,” Wen said. “At the same time I used Ghost Dragon to upload the virus, I downloaded current data on Rong Lo, his complete profile, as well as up-to-date status of HuumaX CHIP program.”

  “You’re resourceful,” Chase said.

  She smiled. “My training wasn’t all bad.”

  “Do you really think we can find him?”

  “I am certain of it.”

  “How can you be so confident?”

  “I know his greed, his lust for power, how he thinks, how he hunts, how he fights, how he kills . . . Rong Lo trained me. He was my superior officer for seven years.”

  Sixty-Nine

  “So Rong Lo trusted you?” Chase asked, after recovering from Wen’s latest admission.

  “He trusts no one, but he believed I was loyal.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “Not ever,” she said, so defiantly the words seemed to almost cause her physical pain.

  “That means you’re smarter than him.”

  “Maybe. But definitely clearer and stronger,” she said quietly. “Clarity and strength come from being on the right side . . . justice, truth, and kindness. Rong Lo is an evil man.”

  “How will we know if our files are erased?”

  “We can use the Antimatter Machine to access Ghost Dragon and see, but we should only do it after he is dead. Otherwise it’s too risky.”

  Chase and Wen continued looking for solutions as the miles clicked away and the night deepened.

  “I’m stunned by how far HuumaX has gotten with CHIP,” Chase said, referring to the startling data he’d reviewed earlier on Wen’s smuggled drives.

  “If they get hold of RAI, they’ll soon have an army of CHIPs ready to blend into the general populations around the world.”

  “The scale of China,” he said.

  “Yes. And they’ve been working to get RAI since even before you sold it.”

  “I sold RAI because I needed the money to develop the SEER,” Chase said. “If I’d had SEER, I would have realized selling RAI was the worst thing I could have done. But I can stop it.” Chase pointed to his laptop. “I need one more key from TruNeural and I can get back in. Let’s try Dez again.”

  No response.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked.

  “No. He wouldn’t be this silent. We’ve got a secure thirty-six-encrypted lockbox on the cloud where we leave code and . . . ” Chase pulled it up. “Wow. He got it!” Dez had uploaded the final piece from Garbo-three to their secret server. “It’s all here.” Chase explained his plan to stop RAIN. “But we need an access point, or I can’t do it.”

  She began searching, utilizing the advance capabilities of the Antimatter Machine. A few minutes later, she stood up, excited. “Ghost Dragon! It’s the way into TruNeural!”

  “The MSS mass database? How?”

  “Well, not exactly Ghost Dragon, but remember, the NSA developed it first. The Chinese just stole it. The US has their own database—at least we think they do. It’s called ‘Heaven.’”

  “Funny name.”

  “They call it that because just like the church’s Heaven, people believe it’s in the cloud, but no one can prove it actually exists.”

  “Ah.”

  “But if it does exist, then everything one could possibly want is there. The problem is like the other Heaven, the only way to get there is to die. And even then . . . ”

  “You could go to hell instead,” Chase finished.

  “Exactly.”

  “Then how do we get into Heaven?”

  “We need to talk to an angel, and I know just the one,” she said, keyin
g into the Antimatter Machine.

  Fifteen seconds later, the Astronaut’s voice came through. She quickly explained their predicament.

  “Yes, it’s real,” Nash said. “It’s like a giant umbrella over everything. The internet, the darknet, the intelligence networks—everything must filter through Heaven.”

  “Can we get in?”

  “It’s thought to be impenetrable. You have to die to get there, but there are ways. Heaven wasn’t created by God. There are contractors who work, build, and maintain Heaven. They are kept isolated, and none of them know the real purpose and scope of the thing.”

  “Do you have a list of those contractors?”

  “I do.”

  “Can you send it to us?”

  “I’m sorry, I cannot.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t tell you that either.”

  “We need it.”

  “I know.”

  “Can you at least tell us one? The closest one to us?”

  Silence.

  “Please?” Wen asked.

  “There are six in the country. Vienna, Virginia, Austin, Texas, Seattle, and three in the bay area, but the security, the time . . . ”

  San Francisco. Wen and Chase looked at each other.

  “Please give us the ones in San Francisco.”

  He did. And then he was gone.

  Chase looked them up. “We just got a gift from God, and we’re going straight to Heaven,” he sang.

  “What?”

  “One of the contractors is located in the Sales Force Tower, and my brother can get us in!”

  Flint called back. “Let’s keep this short,” he said urgently. “There is a town ahead on the line. You’ll pass through early morning. Get off the train when you see the Kamloops Country Club—it’s a big golf course right next to the tracks. Walk south along the edge of the greens and you’ll run into the airport. Five minutes.”

  “Got it, then what? We need to get to San Francisco,” Chase said as he and Wen both listened to Flint's instructions.