Annika Dahl and Yatin Kumar took a taxi from the hotel.
"You’re not going to tell me where we’re going?" Yatin asked her.
She looked coy and shook her head. "It’s a surprise."
Annika looked calm and cool on the outside, of course. She always did. Projecting confidence and absolute control was something she’d inherited from her father. But inside, she was nervous as she could be about seeing her old roommate. Well, there was no turning back now.
Her heart fluttered a little as she remembered those few cold nights in the dorm, when the heat had been accidentally shut off and they’d shared Annika’s bed to stay warm. The circumstances, combined with a bottle of wine, had led to some interesting experimentation. They never did it again, and never talked about it. It made Annika smile to think of it now, though.
"Have you been to Atlanta before?" Yatin asked as the cab entered the Downtown Connector northbound.
Annika nodded. "Several times. I like it, but it isn’t New York."
"No, it isn’t," Yatin agreed. "It’s a big, sprawling, American city. Did I tell you that there is an Oracle node located here?"
"Maybe you did. I don’t know if you told me or if I just knew."
"Not many people know where Oracle’s nodes are located. I’m impressed."
"Well, I don’t know where they’re all located," Annika said. "Just a few."
"I guess it isn’t exactly a secret, is it?" Yatin sounded ever so slightly annoyed. Could he possibly be jealous of anyone who knew anything about Oracle?
Traffic on the Connector moved at a steady pace. To the left Annika saw the Coca-Cola headquarters behind the Georgia Tech campus. To the right, midtown’s ornately crowned skyscrapers differentiated it from downtown. The Connector bisected the city into East and West, like a river of tarmac and flowing steel. She knew there was an Oracle node somewhere in the city, but she didn’t know where. Yatin Kumar knew where. He needn’t feel jealous. Were she to hazard a guess it would be somewhere on the Georgia Tech campus.
"Where are we going again?" Yatin asked. "And who are we meeting?"
"Buckhead," Annika told him. "My roommate from college is there at a party."
"You go to a lot of parties."
"I suppose I do. Why? Don’t you like parties?" She knew he didn’t, she could tell last night at her father’s house. He’d only gone there to meet her.
He shrugged in a noncommittal way.
"You never know who you’ll meet at a party," Annika said, feeling provocative. "Or do you?"
Yatin shot a look at her. "What do you mean?"
She smiled. "I suppose if you had your fortune read to you by a gypsy and you learned your destiny, you might know that at a certain party you would meet a certain…someone." She looked at him. He wasn’t smiling. He looked concerned. "Come on," she said, nudging him playfully. "I’m only kidding. Are you angry with me?"
Yatin glanced at her, then shook his head. "I’m worried about Oracle’s Atlanta node."
"Why, because of your e-mail?"
"Yes. I know it’s only e-mail, but it may be indicative of a bigger problem. I may have to pay a visit to the node."
"You would rather do that than go with me to the party," Annika said.
He hesitated, then shook his head again. "No. It can wait until tomorrow, I guess."
"Then tonight, don’t worry about it."
Yatin allowed a half-hearted smile. "Do you think we will meet any interesting people?"
"Oh, I am sure of it," Annika answered.
Ellen Barnes was her name this time. Ellen Barnes. It sounded very suburban, very middle-class, very married with children. She looked it, too. The blonde wig, the big sunglasses, the soft red lipstick, the French nails, the blue slacks, light blue blouse and tope pumps all gave her that mini-van feeling. The only thing that spoiled it was the 9mm automatic and stainless-steel silencer in her purse.
She’d been waiting in Atlanta for a week, waiting for word to proceed with the assignment. It was a simple assassination. A little girl. Ellen Barnes, which was how she now thought of herself, didn’t care that her assigned target was a child. Children died all the time. It didn’t matter to the universe how old a person was; when it was time to die…it was time to die.
Ellen Barnes actually drove a nondescript sedan as opposed to a mini-van. In a silver plum sedan it was much easier to get lost in traffic, an important consideration given that, if things went wrong, she could find herself the target of a police manhunt. It could happen. It had happened.
She had done it several times now, simply walked up to her target, shot him or her, dropped the gun, walked away, got into a nondescript sedan and disappeared. Not once had she even been pulled over. She worked only for whomever contacted her through her middleman, a person she had never met, and who could afford her price, and who only communicated with her via the Internet. She’d killed seven people so far: a wealthy widow, a young playboy, a Navy Rear Admiral, a drug dealer, a mobster, a restaurant owner, and a Teamster boss. She didn’t know who her employers were, and she didn’t care. She didn’t know if the people she’d killed were good or evil, and she didn’t care.
She drove through the Buckhead financial district of Atlanta, towards one of the ritzier parts of town. She hardly noticed the mansions on either side of the street on West Paces Ferry Road. Wealth meant nothing to her. She had wealth. She came from wealth. She did what she did because she liked doing it, not for the money, not because she didn’t know how to do anything else. She’d always liked living life on the edge, and this was as close to the edge as one could get without going over.
The morality of her actions did not concern her. Morality was a purely human invention. People created their own moral compasses and followed their own paths. She believed the universe was amoral. The universe did not care. If all of humanity were destroyed in a single, cataclysmic event the universe would hum along as always. Hence, Ellen Barnes believed the only person she owed anything to was herself, to allow herself to do as she pleased, regardless of the effects on others. She had her one life and she intended to get to the end of the road satisfied that she had lived that life as extremely as possible. Otherwise, how could she justify her own life to herself?
Ultimately, she was only answerable to herself. Once she was gone, the very fact that she had existed would cease to matter, period. She was the only one who cared that she had ever lived. All else was illusion. When she was dead, the illusion would dissipate under the light of reality like a fog under the light of the sun.
Chapter 27
Let’s talk about Parindra Jadeja. Let’s talk about the Lion of India. Let’s talk about forty thousand in Lahore, Pakistan.
Who believed he would actually do it? No one, of course. To believe it would almost have been to condone it, to allow it, or to bless it. He was the Lion, intensifying the conflict between India and Pakistan in spite of pressure from the United Nations and, more importantly, the United States, to back down. Pakistan was a rogue state, they agreed, but it had nuclear capabilities. So do we, the Lion had said. It was rumored that he’d been angered by the implications that Pakistan posed such a threat to India, and not the other way around. His anger became the spark that ignited a nuclear inferno, devouring the fragile lives of forty thousand human beings in Lahore, Pakistan in an instant.
Within a year there were folk songs, plays, documentaries, movies, television specials, and books about the Lion of India. He was compared to Hitler and Stalin, the first great evil man of the new millennium. In India, of course, he was a hero, at least for a short while.
Vincent Waldrup remembered. Even to his jaded eye what had happened in Pakistan was a tragedy beyond the ken of normal human experience. Forty thousand. It was a number almost too big to imagine in the sense that each one of those forty thousand had been an individual, a person who liked warm summer days, wished to someday become an astronaut, desired the shy boy across the street, wanted to learn French, loved i
ce cream… All the desires and fears and hopes and dreams and dislikes and worries and memories that made a human being a human being, times forty thousand.
It blew Vincent’s mind. His wife, his daughter, his parents, his brothers and sister, all his aunts and uncles and cousins, his college roommates, his childhood friends, his classmates from kindergarten all the way through to graduate school, his co-workers, his basketball buddies, every sports team he’d ever played on, all of his in-laws and all the friends of his children…all dead. Everyone he’d ever known, and it wasn’t even close to forty thousand souls.
When he thought of death, Vincent Waldrup found himself at a loss. He didn’t know what to think. The concepts of Heaven and Hell seemed pathetically inadequate to account for what happened when one lost one’s life. And when Vincent tried to imagine nonexistence, nothingness, he felt his entire body go cold with a fear like nothing he’d ever experienced. That, times forty thousand, was what he imagined when he thought of the Lion of India, and when he thought of those who might come after, latter day Parindra Jadejas.
They had allowed it to happen. Peter Cornwall, Andrei Udin, Chiang Teng-chi, Luc Beauchamp and he, Vincent Waldrup, had it within their power to stop Parindra Jadeja. They could have said yes, yes we will allow his death, and forty thousand in Pakistan would have lived. But they’d been weak, unwilling to believe what Oracle had told them. In a way, Vincent viewed those forty thousand Pakistanis as having been sacrificed for what was ultimately the true purpose of Oracle, which was to make sure that something like that never happened in the United States of America. To stop it from happening, the unthinkable had to be not only thinkable, but real. Now, it would never happen again, much like the Holocaust inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis. It would never happen again because it had been allowed to happen once, and there was an indelible record of it that would never fade away. More importantly, it had happened somewhere else, not the U.S, and the lesson had been learned without the loss of American lives.
Without Oracle, Americans did not have anyone, nor anything, capable of realistically protecting them from the next Parindra Jadeja. Forget the FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service, forget the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines, because in truth they could not adequately protect the American people from a Timothy McVey or Osama bin Laden. Only Oracle had proved itself, warning them of Parindra Jadeja. They ignored the warning, unwilling to make the morally ambiguous decision to sacrifice a life based on the prognostication of an artificial Nostradamus.
Vincent was determined to do whatever it took to make sure that never happened again. Oracle’s secret program of assassination, and their involvement in it, could not be exposed. Who would understand? The forty thousand in Pakistan, perhaps, but their voices had been silenced forever.
Peter Cornwall sincerely wished Oracle had never existed. As terrible as the Parindra Jadejas of the world were, he believed their being to be a form of social Darwinism, as necessary to the healthy continuance of human civilization as the Stephen Hawkings, Albert Einsteins, Winston Churchills, Mother Theresas and John Lennons of the world. He’d only recently started to think that way. After what the Lion of India had done, Cornwall was at first as vehemently determined as the rest of them to do what they could to make sure it never happened again.
Never again, those were the words spoken over and over again like a mantra to soothe the souls of the guilty, praying to God, begging to Him not to damn them to Hell for what they’d done, or for what they’d neglected to do. After the assassination of Delphine Armat, however, Cornwall began to have doubts. The doubts had taken root deep in his subconscious and slowly grew into dark dreams and nightmares, causing him to awaken in the middle of the night, night after night for several weeks, until his conscious mind finally paid heed to the message. He’d been terribly wrong.
Now, he was trying to make up for his mistakes. There was still time to set the record straight, to balance his moral leger sheet. No, he did not fear an eternity of torture for what he’d done, rather he feared his own self-loathing.
Let civilization follow along its natural course, and Oracle be damned. Ultimately, Cornwall believed, civilization as a whole knew instinctively what was best and acted accordingly. Thousands, millions might die, but the whole of humanity would surge forward better for it, improved by the lessons of tragedies that were otherwise unspeakable in a civilized tongue. Oracle had been created precisely to guide humanity forward while avoiding such horrific lessons, but that was impossible. The fires of the Holocaust and the Black Diaspora had been as necessary to ensuring that civilization surged ahead as the creation of jazz and discovery of penicillin.
Oracle was a mistake, despite all the best intentions of the United Nations and Yatin Kumar, Oracle’s philosopher-programmer. Even if it worked, even if Oracle had successfully untangled the bloody knots of the Middle East and Northern Ireland, ultimately civilization would suffer far worse than if left alone. Forty thousand in Lahore had died following the natural course of history, and the world was once again reminded of the terrible djinn it had released from the atom, and therefore the world would not see the even greater use of nuclear weapons it probably would have eventually seen had Oracle been allowed to stop Parindra Jadeja, the Lion of India.
The day after Lahore, Nevin Cardinal Roscoe had gotten drunk on red wine in Rome. His best friend at the Vatican, Michael Cardinal Leary of Ireland, had gone to India to speak to Parindra Jadeja. He’d said, half joking, that if the Lion of India used a nuclear bomb on Pakistan it would mean that he, Cardinal Roscoe’s friend, was dead. Cardinal Roscoe knew, as soon as he heard the news, that his friend was dead.
Guilt. Forty thousand innocent men, women, and children had been obliterated in an instant and all he could think about was his friend. How he and Leary would stay awake until dawn discussing the Catechism, Church history, the role of the Church in the modern world and how it fit into the big picture. Leary was passionate about Catholicism. He questioned God every day, as he’d confessed to Cardinal Roscoe more than once. It was part of the job, he would say. It was part of being Catholic.
Leary would have loved the concept of Augustine. Infused with all the doctrine, all the philosophy, all the facts and figures, all the history of the Church, speaking with Augustine was almost like speaking with Catholicism made sentient by Papal decree. Sometimes, Cardinal Roscoe could almost believe that Leary’s soul now inhabited Augustine. That would be Heaven for Leary.
Cardinal Roscoe went to India himself after Lahore, in his unofficial capacity as an operative of the Pope. Spying. First and foremost, his mission was to find out what had happened to Leary, to find out if his friend might now be eligible for martyrdom. Beyond that, to find out if any other Catholics in India were being persecuted for rallying against Jadeja in opposition of his policies regarding Pakistan. The only time he had to contemplate the fates of forty thousand victims of nuclear holocaust was on the plane as he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. Forty thousand screams of terror haunted him, a primordial fireball devouring their essence and keeping sleep for Cardinal Roscoe far, far away.
Cardinal Roscoe remembered a debate in the College of Cardinals some months before Lahore. The question had been raised: Can a nuclear explosion destroy souls as well as bodies? The question was brought to the floor by a young Cardinal who also happened to have a degree in Physics from the University of Chicago. Of course the argument went that no creation of Man could undo any of God’s works, and souls were most definitely God’s works. But, said the Physicist Cardinal, a nuclear explosion was not a man-made event. The mechanism by which the explosion occurred was, to be sure, but the chain reaction that resulted in the nuclear inferno was Nature. Or, as he put it, the work of God. Then someone else had said, or the work of Satan.
Nuclear fire was the fire of Hell. That was not so difficult to believe. Cardinal Roscoe didn’t believe that a soul could be destroyed, though. A soul was part of the essential fabric of the universe as created
by God. A soul was part of God, a minute swatch cut from the fabric of God’s being. Indestructible and eternal.
Christie Seifert had been in Buenos Aires, Argentina when she first heard about what had happened to Lahore. Forty thousand people wiped out in a flash, the biggest news event since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and there she was on the wrong side of the Goddamn planet. Just her luck. She’d been struggling to prove herself at CNN and had gone to Buenos Aires to report on protests over the UN’s placement of a node there, for the fledgling Oracle program, buried underground right in the heart of downtown at a cost of around one billion U.S. dollars.
Wasn’t Oracle meant to prevent something like Lahore from ever happening? There was a story in there, somewhere. Christie could practically taste it. The people in Buenos Aires feared Oracle. There were rumors about the AI, that it was controlled by some organization other than the UN, like the Illuminati or something. Christie had dismissed the rumors as irrational fear.
But maybe there was something to it after all. Oracle had been up and running for two years, although there were only half a dozen nodes in place at the time of Lahore: New York, Moscow, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Cairo. Pakistan/India relations were a top priority for Oracle, along with the Middle East, Central Africa, Northern Ireland, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Colombia.
The Lion of India’s act of nuclear terrorism against Pakistan had caught everyone else by surprise. Shouldn’t Oracle at the very least have worked out a scenario that accounted for what had actually happened? Shouldn’t Oracle have done something to prevent it? Maybe it had tried, and failed. That was always a possibility. Christie decided to investigate further. Whatever the path her investigations led her, she would follow it.
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