“Worse, it’s likely he doesn’t know if he succeeded or not. He meant to keep me, but if he couldn’t, he would never allow me to live. And if he sent his people after me after my car exploded but didn’t follow me himself—and it stands to reason that that’s what he would do, he’s the boss, the brains, they’re only the muscle—then he doesn’t know about you, Donovan. He doesn’t know you came for me, and the military intervened before he could at least make sure I was dead. He ran. He doesn’t know if I died or not, if his people killed me before they themselves were killed or if I died in the battle. He needs to know, to make sure. And he needs proof. Even if he succeeded, he has failed unless he can provide proof. We haven’t given him chatter, I made sure everyone remains silent on the attack, and that the name Oracle is not mentioned, nor mine, remember? He doesn’t know what happened to me, and his people at his headquarters won’t know either, even if they are trying to listen to our intelligence.”
Donovan frowned. “You’re right. He wouldn’t know if you’re still alive or not.” He hadn’t considered the possibility. They all assumed Elijahn would know she was alive.
“He could lay low. Wait in the United States, even here in DC.” Scholes said.
“For how long? If he doesn’t contact his people soon, he will be assumed dead and will lose them. If he doesn’t go back, they will eventually leave him or someone else will take over, and he will lose his headquarters and that’s too important to him. No, he needs to show them he’s alive. And he can’t do that without proving to them that he destroyed Oracle, or they might turn against him anyway. Right now, he stands too much of a chance of losing everything.” Her eyes were on the blank screen, contemplating. She shook her head. “He’s done so much to find Oracle, to come here, to get to it. So much effort, so much time. This guy doesn’t stop until he gets what he wants. He’s tenacious.”
“And he hates you,” Donovan remarked.
“Yes, there’s that.” She thought back to her conversation with Elijahn. The way he sounded. The way he looked. “There is that.”
Donovan’s phone chirped, and he glanced at it and answered. “That was Ben,” he said when he’d ended the call. “Of the four DNA samples with no bodies to match, there is no identification for two, but the other two belong to hired guns. Brothers, former bodyguards for the Niger president, back when Niger was still independent. They came here with him when he was granted asylum, but apparently went off the grid two months ago.” He looked at Lara with a frown. She shrugged. There were, of course, no matches for the other two samples because they belonged to Elijahn and one of the loyals he had brought with him.
The system operator sitting on the other end of Mission Command called Scholes over, and Lara and Donovan waited, Lara watching Scholes, and Donovan watching Lara.
“And that was Martinez,” Scholes said when he returned. “They found two bodies crammed in an old well, buried under some rocks. Not far from the burned SUV.”
“Damn,” Donovan said. That was two out of two.
Oracle shrugged again.
“I told Martinez to get his people back to watch the IDSD complex,” Scholes said.
“Don’t.” Lara frowned. “At least, not so that they are seen.”
And before Donovan could react she turned to him. “And no, I’m not doing anything to endanger myself.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Irritating, isn’t it? When somebody reads you like that?” she asked him with raised eyebrows. She turned back to Scholes and missed the fleeting grin on Donovan’s face. “One thing Elijahn has learned from the allies’ intelligence is that they don’t see the obvious. They thought he was dead, and he ended up landing in the United States in an airliner, in plain sight, walking right into one of the most protected, high-profile cities in the free world that is home to IDSD and US military forces, then spent two months here, preparing his people, in a nice little warehouse near a mall, of all places. Now he’ll figure they think he is running scared, being hunted, so they won’t expect him to double back to IDSD.
“Except we know otherwise—he is incapable of being the prey. He needs to be the hunter. And he cannot afford to lose. Even if he has to die, if there’s no other way for him but to die, he will die destroying Oracle and leave his people to let everyone know that. His prestige has to be restored even if it outlives him. It wasn’t that way before, what he wanted then was to live to build on his success, and he still does. But now he simply has no choice but to risk it all.”
“And in his fanatic mind there’s only one way he can win. Christ.” Donovan chuckled mirthlessly. “We need to eliminate this guy.”
“No question about that,” Scholes said in a low voice.
Oracle wasn’t listening again. When she spoke her voice was quiet, thoughtful. “He needs to come here, and he thinks he can. He’s safe again, everyone is looking elsewhere. He’ll want to see it, see Oracle with his own eyes. Try to destroy it. He asked me if I was the creator or the operator. I told him I was both. So he still thinks I’m the person behind a machine, the artificial intelligence that is Oracle. If I’m still alive and with the machine, he’ll use the opportunity to kill me. But he won’t look for me now. Not deliberately. Because he doesn’t know if I’m dead, alive, injured. He’ll look for Oracle. And only then he’ll look for Lara Holsworth. And in the meantime, he’ll kill anyone he encounters around the machine on his way to damage it.”
“God.” Ericsson had entered Mission Command in time to hear what she’d said. “Would he do that?”
“He’s smart enough and he has nothing to lose. We know that two years ago he had a plan to break into the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. He still has that plan in his mind, he just needs to adapt it. Think about it. He goes to where he thinks our artificial intelligence center is, quietly. Has one man to help him. There is no one else. So that’s two men alone. Fast and clean. All he has to do is get in, go through the people, find Oracle. Done.” She could see it. Saw it, in her mind. Shook her head. “Here he won’t mind hurting anyone he sees, these are IDSD’s people, his enemies. Internationals and their allies. So we need to be careful.”
“What exactly are you thinking?” Scholes asked. He didn’t like where this was going.
“I want to let him in. Bring him to us.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Ericsson looked stricken.
Lara was looking at Scholes. “Right now IDSD is secured like it’s a fort. It’s been a day. Elijahn’s people are dead. If you thought he was running, all alone, that he won’t dare come here, that Oracle is safe here, and its creator-operator is either safe here or dead, you would reduce security back to normal. Or near normal. So it’s time to reduce security.”
“How will he know where to go?”
“The Advanced Technologies Research building.”
“He doesn’t know where that is.” Ericsson still looked stricken.
“You want to bet?”
“Right.” Scholes sighed. Elijahn had made it his mission in life to get Oracle. He would know where what he believed was artificial intelligence would be.
“Hey, wait a minute.” Ericsson looked from Lara to Scholes and back. “The Advanced Technologies Research building he would know about . . .”
Lara smiled, nodded.
“Say we do this. Do you know how he’ll come into IDSD?” Ericsson asked, looking a lot less stricken now.
Lara tilted her head slightly. That one was obvious. They realized it too, once she told them.
Scholes turned to Ericsson. “How quickly can we do this?”
Ericsson went to work.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Elijahn knew he would be right. They were predictable. True, they had blindsided him before, and they had obviously found out who he was, that he was behind the data center destruction, that he had stolen information belonging to IDSD, that he was after their Oracle. That was what the woman had said.
Thinking about her made his control waver, a
nd he had to make a conscious effort to stifle the rage that burned in him. He had no idea what had happened to her. His people had no time to report to him before those damn soldiers attacked them, and he had had to run. Did they get her? Was she with them when they were attacked? Would they remember that if there was no other way he would want them to kill her, not risk letting her be rescued?
Not knowing was excruciating, and it was what had brought him here. He no longer had any other choice but to go directly to the computer itself. Oracle was far more important. If the woman was dead, destroying the computer would be an added bonus. If she was still alive, it would be a necessity. At least one of the two had to be gone for his plan to succeed. And perhaps she would be there, with her blasted creation, and he would have his revenge. His plans of taking her were ruined, which was most unfortunate indeed, but even her death would be not only necessary, but also extremely satisfying.
And if after that day he still did not know what happened to her, he would look for her later, find out if she was alive. With the power he would have once he exposed the existence of Oracle to all those who had abandoned him, and proved that he had singlehandedly destroyed it—without telling them of the failures on the way, of course—and with the patience he had disciplined himself to have, he would find her. And he would, eventually, kill her. Not only because if she was alive she could create another Oracle. Yes, that too. But mostly because he wanted so very much to kill her.
He was having no luck controlling his hatred. That was bad. He felt his man’s eyes on him and forced himself under control. He was lucky the man was still loyal, even after this last staggering failure. He could not allow him to think something might be disturbing the completion of the plan. Another failure, another weakness, would not be forgiven.
They were walking inside the IDSD complex. Right there in the open. Elijahn sneered. It had been so easy getting into this so-called secure place. He had chosen the one role that would allow them to do as they pleased without anyone questioning their presence there. Security agents. The clothes both he and his man wore and the handgun Elijahn held were courtesy of the security agent he had killed. Ransacking the dead man’s house had been meant to hide the theft, and it obviously worked. The man had, of course, only one handgun, but the jackets Elijahn and his man wore on this cool night helped hide the fact that one of their weapons was not standard issue. True, there were more elegant ways to do this, but since he had killed the hacker, and as all of his men but one were dead and he was out of time, he had no choice but to settle for some footwork.
His luck, it seemed, had finally changed. He had gotten away and had rendezvoused with his man at the extra car, a sedan disguised as an IDSD vehicle he had made sure was safely hidden, which had all they needed in it. He had not planned to use it this way. It had originally been there to allow him to transfer the woman to it and disguise himself and his men as he had now, in case they were stopped on the way to the plane. But this was as good a use for it as any.
They had waited for some hours, he and his last remaining man. The best time to enter IDSD was at shift change, and he had worried that because only some twenty-four hours had passed since his failed attacks, there would be too much security at the gates. But the substantial forces that had been there these past days were already gone. Which did make sense. After what had transpired only miles outside this place, they would expect him to be far away by now, trying to run, to disappear. And who knows, it occurred to him, perhaps they even thought he was among the dead.
They had entered on foot from the secondary IDSD gate adjacent to the residential part of this huge complex, where shift change, in fact the end of the second shift, meant the gate had quite a few people on foot walking through it. They had followed closely behind incoming security agents dressed like them, conversing animatedly, and the guards at the gate, a sleepy lot this time of night in this obviously lower security entrance, had given their IDs only a cursory glance and did not even ask them, did not ask any of the new shift’s staff, in fact, to let the automated system scan their IDs. The IDs were perfect forgeries, down to a chip assigned an identical coded signal to that which the dead security agent’s ID had in it, for Elijahn, a risk, of course, if it was no longer valid, and no signal for that of his man, which he could cite as a malfunction, if need be. It was fortunate that they were not scanned. Or, perhaps, it was a sign of his impending success.
Elijahn might have been worried about venturing into IDSD this way. But the fact that even after he had broken into and destroyed the data center, which led to increased security everywhere, he still managed so easily to kill an IDSD senior security agent and use his ID and access authorizations to steal the information he wanted, had taught him that despite its obviously substantial security, IDSD was not very good at protecting itself. He was, he knew, so very unpredictable for them, and so much smarter. It was all a bit too obvious perhaps, but then he had managed to get into the United States so easily because nobody saw the obvious. So why not just walk into IDSD? They would not be looking for him here. True, it was a risk. But he had to take it. After all that had happened, he had to.
Now that he and his man were in, they walked quickly to their destination through the darkness, meeting no one on their way. The three-story building was silent, dormant this time of night. The only signs of life were the lighted front entrance and the lobby beyond it, and sporadic lights that shone in the upper-floor windows. Elijahn stood looking at the name on the building. Advanced Technology Research. He felt his excitement rise.
They skirted the building and approached it from the small parking lot adjacent to it, on its right, and found the side door they were looking for. Elijahn expected the front doors to have biometric identification and perhaps also security agents—this was after all an important building for IDSD—but side doors tended to be overlooked. It was closed, though, and Elijahn told his man to cover him and attached a small device to the lock. The device interfered with the lock’s local signal, and the red light on it began switching between red and green. Then it turned off. Elijahn opened the door, motioned his man in, and followed him, detaching the device and shutting the door. The lock resumed working.
The corridor they were in was empty, but neither of them drew their guns. If there were cameras there, Elijahn wanted them to see two harmless security agents. With their caps low on their heads, they would not be suspected. They walked silently through the floor, avoiding the lobby, until finally Elijahn found the door to the stairwell. He opened it and went in, his man following him. He was right. This was an obvious place to have a guidance screen that would tell anyone using the stairs what was on the floor they were on.
The artificial intelligence was not on this floor, only conference rooms and administrative offices. Both the underground floor and the upper floor had research labs. Elijahn thought for a moment, recalling what his unfortunately dead hacker had told him about the conditions that type of a computer would need. He then descended the stairs, his man following him.
It was colder down here, and the hum of the massive cooling systems reverberated in the air. This had to be it. They inched forward. This corridor was so much wider, white, flawless. They passed a transparent door to their left, then another. The first room was empty. The second had some people in it, scientists in white lab coats and masks who did not turn around, did not see them, too intent on their work. This was not it. He proceeded to the next door—some more people here—then to another, and then he halted. Ahead, the corridor ended in a wall with a large sliding door in it. A screen to the left of the door flashed a name. O.R.A.C.L.E. Command. He knew the symbol under it. High clearance access only. The active biometric system under the screen told him there was no way he could get in.
He raised his gun and shot it.
The biometric system went dead and the door began to open but Elijahn wasn’t looking at it any longer, he had already turned to look behind him. No alarm was sounding. He had shot the biomet
ric system protecting the room Oracle was in and yet there was no alarm. And they had met no people on the streets of this major complex. And this place was silent. Too silent, even for a research building, and even at this time of night. And where were all the people who should have been beside the artificial intelligence? The door to where it was housed was opening, so where were the voices of those who should have been inside with it? Not bothering to look back at what lay beyond the opening door, he walked quickly to the last room he had seen those scientists in. He peeked inside. No one.
He swerved back at his man’s shout, an edge of panic to his words. “It’s empty. There is nothing here.”
He was in a basement. Trapped. He ran toward the stairs, aimed and shot at the first of the soldiers who were running down them, futile shots that could not penetrate body armor, and did not turn at the shots behind him, then the silence, as more soldiers, some still clad in lab coats, broke through the rooms along the corridor and shot his man who had shot at them.
Disbelief came first, and rage followed, overtook him, blinded him. But that exactly had been his mistake, he now realized. He should have run, regrouped like last time. Instead, his mind had been on a single track since the failure of the night before, when his targets—all of them—had gotten away from him, and the woman, the one true target, had gotten the better of him, preventing the completion of his plan and getting his men, his best men, killed. A woman, of all things.
The rage threatened to take over again but there was no time, he had to think fast. He thought about what he wanted, what was important to him. He would not, could not let himself be paraded out of here like a lowly terrorist. Already they were shouting at him to put it down, put the gun down, lie on the floor and put his hands behind his head.
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