“So, why isn’t that extra footage out there?”
“It is,” said Bug. “I mean, it’s out there now. I used a network of a couple thousand servers and fake accounts we have set up to seed the complete video files to YouTube and like a zillion other sites, including BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Politico, Snopes, you name it. It’s trending like crazy, and because it’s trending so heavily, the twenty-four-hour news services have had to pick it up in order to stay current. Fox and MSNBC started showing the unedited files an hour ago, and now Joe Ledger isn’t the bad guy. He’s kind of a badass hero.”
“Yay me,” I said listlessly. “What about the DMS?”
“I, um, tapped a few of Mr. Church’s friends in the industry to go on as talking heads. Turn on any news feed and three of the four talking heads are ours. Some of them are talking about the strategic importance of deep-cover covert ops. Some are talking about how the DMS has been key in those stories the general population already know—the Sea of Hope, the drone thing, the pathogen outbreak at the Liberty Bell Center in Philly, and how we’re part of the ongoing response to the Dogs of War rabies and nanites thing. We’ve got endorsements from the last four presidents, the past three secretary-generals of the U.N., and the who’s who of Nobel Prize winners. Plus generals, heads of state. We’re crushing the whole ‘DMS are bad guys’ thing.”
“Nice to know you still have friends in the industry,” I said to Church.
This time he did smile. “Don’t ever let yourself believe that political party affiliations, right or left, dictate everyone’s actions or inspire everyone to compromise their own ethics. The people it is my pleasure to call friends tend to go deeper into the concept of patriotism than that, and they do not play party politics. Not when that requires that they act against the genuine best interests of the American people.”
“Yeah, well, that’s pretty frigging great and all,” I said, “but doesn’t that put us more out than we were?”
“Out is out,” said Church. “The DMS is no longer a secret organization and never will be again. We need to accept that and move on.”
“Who else’s name is out there other than mine?”
“No one,” said Bug. “We stopped that in its tracks.”
I sat back and sipped my coffee. My hands were shaking, and not all of it was from the caffeine I’d been chugging since getting to the hospital. “Where’s the White House in all this? There hasn’t even been an official statement about the earthquake other than the usual ‘thoughts and prayers’ crap.”
“Nothing from the Oval Office,” said Church. “Though there was a tweet about ‘rogue secret organizations’ undermining the country.”
“I missed that one.”
“It was pulled as soon as the full video stories hit the news services,” said Bug.
I glared at him. “Can’t you just go in and deactivate his social media accounts?”
“Sure, except that I’m under orders not to.” He glanced at Church, who shrugged.
“The DMS is not a bully,” said Church, “and it is not our policy to interfere with the First Amendment. What Bug did with the cell phone videos is providing more information, not editing what is being put out there.”
“And our talking heads?”
Church looked me in the eye. “Find one who has uttered a single untruth.”
I sighed. “Guess I’ve become too conditioned to false narratives.”
“Sign of the times,” said Bug. “Oh, hey, on a totally different topic … when are you coming up here, Joe?”
“I … um … well, with Auntie and all…”
“Captain,” said Church, “I don’t think there’s anything else you can accomplish here. Doc Holliday has been in discussions with Junie about the incident on the road with the Closers and the T-craft. And Nikki Bloom will likely have useful information based on the keywords you provided. Take my jet to Brooklyn. Listen to the presentation and then we’ll talk again.”
And that was the end of the conversation. He stood up and tapped the Scroll to end the videoconference. His expressions are always hard to read, but I knew enough not to push the matter now. He wanted me in New York and I think he wanted to use the time it would take me to get there to allow him some quiet time to think things through. Pushing him on it wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
So I went to Brooklyn.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
After Captain Ledger left, Mr. Church spent two hours sitting beside Aunt Sallie’s bed, holding one limp hand. He ignored the constant noise of the ICU and instead listened to his own thoughts. Auntie slept on, probably unaware that he was there. Parts of frowns and splinters of winces tried to manifest on her features—conjured no doubt by her dreams—but the muscles were too slack and the emotions melted away.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, and when he looked at the display he felt a wince form on his own mouth. Church rose and walked into the hall and stepped into a quiet corner as he answered.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” he said. “I’m glad you and your family are safe.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“A joke, sir?”
“Oh, like I’m supposed to believe you’re happy the White House didn’t fall down on our heads.”
Church closed his eyes. “Why would I make a joke in a time like this? My concern is genuine. And again, I extend the offer for any assistance myself or my department can offer.”
“Assistance? That’s a laugh. You’re lucky I don’t have you and everyone who works for the DSM arrested. Your boy Ledger is a terrorist and belongs in Guantanamo. I’ve spoken with the director of Homeland Security and the attorney general, and don’t be surprised if you hear from them.”
“Mr. President,” said Church patiently, “I would caution you against taking such an action. I understand that you are upset, but I can assure you that Captain Ledger is—”
“He’s a psychopath and a criminal and he’s going to jail. I’ve requested that Congress establish a committee to review all DSM cases and actions, and as soon as things settle down here you can expect that to happen. Don’t think it won’t. You’ve been a rogue organization for too long and I will shut you down.”
“Mr. President, it would be a mistake to cross that line.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It is a statement of fact. The DMS exists to be a first line of defense against terrorist threats involving radical technologies. We are uniquely qualified to handle such threats, and we are structured to be a rapid-response unit. There is no other organization within the United States government that can do what we do. Not in the intelligence community nor the military. To remove us would be to expose this nation to grave threats.”
“Wow, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered this level of arrogance before,” said the president. “Who exactly do you think you are?”
Church said nothing.
“I’m going to take you down,” warned the president. “You and every single one of the traitors who works for you. That’s a promise. Want to make another threat now? Is that what you want to do? Go ahead, see what happens.”
“No, Mr. President,” said Church evenly, “I believe we understand each other.”
The president began to say something else, but Church ended the call. He leaned on the wall for almost a full minute, looking down the hallway at the door to Aunt Sallie’s room. He pushed off the wall and began walking away when his phone vibrated again. Despite the stress he was feeling, Church smiled when he saw who it was.
“Lilith,” he said gently. “It’s good to hear your—”
“Listen to me,” barked Lilith, “it’s Violin.…”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
OVER PENNSYLVANIA AIRSPACE
While I flew to Brooklyn I spent some quality time with the DMS version of an Identikit, which is a utility cops all over the world use to make comp
osite drawings of suspects. Like all cops—or in my case, former cops—I’m a trained observer who knows how to spot unique details. The MindReader version is intuitive and offered a lot of suggestions based on the architecture of similar kinds of faces to the one I was building. It took about an hour and two glasses of Church’s very expensive Teeling Vintage Reserve, thirty-year-old Irish single malt, but when I was done I stared down at the face of the man who’d Tased Ghost and me.
It was not a killer’s face. There was none of the vacuous stupidity of the street criminal or the hardened soullessness of the professional assassin about him. There was no fanatical gleam in his eyes. It was a face. In my reconstruction I’d even managed to put some of the emotion I’d seen on his features. Regret. I was sure of that. And fear. Maybe even panic.
I hit the keys to enter the image into the MindReader facial recognition and pattern search utilities. They not only matched the photo to indices of mug shots, but also the millions of snapshots taken by traffic cams, airport cams, CCTV, and social media. The collective database was massive and I leaned back with my whiskey and figured that I’d get some kind of hit within the next twenty-four hours.
The system pinged me in eight minutes, and that reminded me that MindReader Q1 was a quantum computer. It did not search or process like any other system on Earth. It was faster by orders of magnitude.
Several photos popped up on the screen, each tagged with source data. There were versions of the man with different haircuts and hair colors, varying degrees of tan, shifting eye color, and a variety of facial hair styles. But they were all the same man. MindReader kicked out seventeen aliases, but one name began showing up over and over again. I leaned close to study this man.
“Valen Oruraka,” I said. “Now who in the wide blue fuck are you?”
As if in answer, the system began chunking out data in bulk. The name was clearly phony, and even though this cat had used a number of false names, Valen Oruraka had become a kind of default personality. The first official record of it was prior to his enrollment at MIT for graduate work. When I checked for his undergraduate records, they all cracked open to reveal phony shit. Whoever had built the Oruraka personality had been pretty good at it, but they hadn’t counted on MindReader.
There was nothing before that, though. No facial recognition pics, no trace. That told me he was not American. Q1 can reverse-engineer photos to show us what adults might have looked like as kids, just as it can age pictures. There were no school photos in any database of that face, and he was young enough to have been in school when all such pictures were digitally archived.
So, I told the system to go wider, and there he was.
I made a call to Church, but couldn’t get through, so I called Bug, who answered. “Look at what I just sent you.”
“Got it,” said Bug, and began giving me the highlights. “Valen Oruraka, aka Oleg Sokolov. Born in Novosibirsk, Russia. Thirty-nine. Unmarried. No children. No living relatives. Parents died when he was young, lived for a while in Ukraine with his aunt and uncle and … wow.”
“Wow, what?”
“His uncle was Dr. Abram Golovin.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s dead, but he was the chief structural engineer at Chernobyl.”
“Hm. What else?”
“Went into the military and, bang, that’s it. Officially he died in a car crash on base. Buried in a family plot in Novosibirsk. Then he shows up in America under the name Valen Oruraka and enrolls in MIT and studied … oh, damn, Joe, you’re going to love this.”
“When you say that I never love it,” I said. “What did you find?”
“Joe, he studied seismology and geophysics.”
“Bingo,” I said, and pointed my finger like a gun at the face on my screen. “Bug, I need you to find this son of a bitch. Put as many people as you need on it. We know he was in D.C. today. My guess is that he’s taking his little God Machine and getting the hell out of Dodge. He knows I saw his face, so I don’t think he’ll be stupid enough to go through airport security. Find him anyway. You hear me? Find him.”
“Yeah,” said Bug. “Count on it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
OVER PENNSYLVANIA AIRSPACE
The plane hadn’t logged very many miles before Bug was back on the line.
“You found him already?” I asked.
“No, no, you got to give me some time,” he said quickly. “But I got something else. Jerry Spencer and his team worked the crime scene where Sam was hurt. They’ve been scraping up pieces of the other biker, and they hit gold. Jerry found the man’s left hand and one intact eye.”
“Okay. Disgusting, but useful. Tell me what he got.”
“Jerry lifted fingerprints and also ran a recognition program off the retina. We got no joy on the prints, but the retina print got a hit. It was in a database of high rollers we, um, borrowed, from a casino in Dubai. The eye belonged to a Greek national named Aristotle Kostas.”
“Wait … I’ve heard that name somewhere. At least the Kostas name. Black market, maybe…?”
“Right. The Kostas family pretty much own the Mediterranean black market, and serious points in illegal trading in the Middle East and Africa. Guns, art, stuff supposedly destroyed by ISIL. He got on our radar as a possible person of interest when we started looking at the Turkish guy, Ohan, who was tied to Rafael Santoro’s search for the Unlearnable Truths.”
“Right. Kostas is the dead guy? How’s a power player like him tied to earthquakes in D.C.?”
“That’s the interesting part,” said Bug. “He went to MIT. Want to guess who his roommate was?”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Some of the images Q1 pulled of Oruraka were from street and hotel cameras in Greece. We can put those two together at like fifty different places in the U.S. and abroad.”
“This is great stuff, Bug. You’re a genius.”
“I am. It’s true,” he said.
“Put it all together and upload it to my computer. And call me the second you find Oruraka.”
“Will do.” And he was gone.
I poured myself another whiskey and felt a knot of tension in my chest ease by one small increment. We had names now. We had a major player who studied seismology and geophysics. We had ties to black marketers, though I didn’t yet know how that played into things. Maybe Ari Kostas was the guy who smuggled the God Machines into the country.
The fact that Kostas and Oruraka were both doing fieldwork on this was interesting. Either their group was so small that everyone had to get their hands dirty; or they were working for someone else. If so, who was upper management?
* * *
I was making inroads into my third glass of Irish whiskey when Church called.
“Glad to hear from you,” I said. “I have something to—”
“Captain, listen to me first,” he cut in, and the tone of his voice instantly chilled me to the bone. “I received a call from Lilith. She said that Violin has been injured while on a mission.”
“How bad?”
“She was shot and has suffered severe blood loss, shock, and internal bleeding. Her status is critical and trauma surgeons are working on her at a United Nations field hospital in Syria.”
“Who shot her?” I demanded. “I am going to fucking kill them.”
Church paused for a moment too long before he answered, and I knew that he was going to say something neither of us wanted to hear.
“It appears that Harry Bolt shot her.”
I nearly threw the expensive whiskey across the cabin. “Tell me.”
He did, about how Violin and her pet idiot had gone on a covert op in Syria. Both of them were fitted with RFID chips, but their signals had abruptly stopped minutes before an earthquake rocked the region.
“Whoa,” I said, “wait a minute. An earthquake?”
“Yes,” said Church.
“Another freaking earthquake? Oh, come on.”
“Yes. Two days ago. It wa
s not particularly large and did no damage to any civilian population, which is why it did not make the news. Bear in mind, Captain, that there are thousands of earthquakes felt around the world. On average, fourteen hundred per year, which averages to about forty per day. Usually only those above magnitude six are reported, and of those, only the ones occurring in industrialized nations or near population centers. Earthquakes are not at all rare, but where they occur along the plate boundaries strongly influences whether anyone notices.”
“Thank you, Bill Nye.”
“This one, though, is suspicious because of the nature of Violin’s mission. She was tracking agents of the black marketer Ohan.”
“Ohan? That piece of shit?”
Ohan, a non-Muslim Turk, was one of the most effective and dangerous dealers in stolen technologies, weapons, and other items that “fell off a truck” in the Middle East. Because the CIA sometimes used him, Ohan’s designation was “hands off.” I had him on my personal list because he was involved in the Kill Switch case. His sideline was obtained items looted from libraries, tombs, sacred sites, and university museums in areas overrun by ISIL.
“It gets worse, Captain,” said Church. “Lilith confirmed that Ohan’s team was searching for another book from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.”
My heart jolted to a painful halt in my chest.
“He’s after one of the Unlearnable Truths?”
“Yes,” said Church. “Lilith sent Violin to secure the book before Ohan’s men could obtain it. Her last report was that she and Harry Bolt had tracked them to the Citadel of Salah Ed-Din, near Al-Haffah. They apparently entered the citadel, there is evidence of several fights, and then the earthquake hit. The Arklight team entered less than a day later and found Violin clinging to life.”
“Why did Harry do it? Why’d he shoot her? Did he out himself as being just like his asshole traitor father?”
Deep Silence Page 29
