In a more complex scenario, the observer always expects to see something, irrespective of what that something is. A security guard watching a closed-circuit video feed, for instance. Stealth technology is useless for robbing a bank since a security guard would be just as alarmed by suddenly seeing nothing as by witnessing the actual crime. In this case, effective invisibility requires the use of transformative optics in order to bend or channel visible light around objects rather than allowing it to be reflected back to the observer, resulting in the cloaked object appearing indistinguishable from its surroundings.
But perhaps the most complex form of invisibility—and the one most applicable and interesting to Alexei—is one in which the observer’s expectations are inconsistent, and may even change over time. In such circumstances the target must employ a form of invisibility known as active camouflage to remain undetected. An octopus, for instance, must adapt to whatever color and texture of coral happens to be nearby when threatened by a shark. A tank moving against a rebel encampment must continue to project an image of the jungle behind it even as its position changes, and regardless of how the light filters down through the trees. And the one hundred-plus acres of land outside LA where Alexei is plotting his tactical revolution can no longer look anything like a fortified compound regardless of the time of day, season, or the altitude or angle from which it is photographed.
There was a knock from outside in the hallway and only a handful of microseconds after Alexei muttered his consent, Emma had analyzed and verified his voice pattern and used an electromagnetic pulse to withdraw the lock. A young Korean girl pushed the heavy door open and stepped in behind it.
“Ki,” Alexei said. He remembered that he was holding a cigarette and got it to the ashtray just in time. “Come on in.”
The girl was wearing a silver full-body swimsuit. The material was coated in tiny synthetic hydrodynamic denticles and her body glistened and shimmered like sharkskin as she moved. Her black hair was wet and hung down in her face.
“I hope I’m not too late,” the girl said. “I was in the pool so I missed your message.”
“No, you’re just in time,” Alexei said. He’d given up on the cigarette and left it twisted and smoldering in the ashtray. “Take a look. Tell me what you see.”
The girl took a moment to consider the screen. “It’s the backyard, isn’t it? Those are the two dormitories.”
“Right. Now watch this. Emma?”
“Yes, Alexei.”
“Activate cloaking on cabin number one.”
The transformation was not instantaneous. The phased array optics of each roof tile and side panel charged and lit up incrementally, creating what appeared from their perspective to be a pixel-by-pixel wave pattern. When it was complete, the cabin closest to the main house was gone and in its place was a sparkling turquoise lagoon with an adjoining hot tub. Deck chairs were scattered throughout the mottled sandstone mosaic surrounding the pool and several long slender bronze bodies reposed luxuriously in mere suggestions of swimwear. The software that rendered them—having access to GPS coordinates and declination tables—even made sure the women faced the sun.
Alexei looked at Ki and saw that her mouth was open.
“What do you think?” he said. “Convincing?”
The girl shook her head. “It’s completely real.”
“It better be,” Alexei said, “considering what I paid for it. Emma, activate cloaking on the second cabin.”
Tile by tile, panel by panel, the second building was replaced by something revealing itself to be agricultural in nature: bountiful verdant rows separated by thin strips of rich black earth. The girl stepped closer to the screen and squinted. There were periodic flecks of pink among the green.
“What is that?” the girl asked.
“It’s a crop of genetically hybridized coca and poppy.”
The girl turned and looked at Alexei. She appeared considerably less impressed than she had just moments ago. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but isn’t the point of this to avoid suspicion?”
“The best way to look guilty,” Alexei told the girl, “is to make yourself look too innocent. Who in their right mind would cover up an illegal operation with another illegal operation?”
“What about the DEA?”
“The DEA barely even operates in this country anymore,” Alexei said dismissively, “much less in California.” He put his canister of tea down and picked his cigarettes up from his desk. “Nobody’s going to care about some nouveau riche playboy douchebag who grows his own party favors.”
The girl passed between Alexei and the screen. She sat in Alexei’s chair and put her bare feet up on the edge of the desk. She flexed her toes and Alexei thought that her painted toenails looked like tiny pink moons.
“This is because of Dre, isn’t it?”
Alexei nodded as he stuck a cigarette between his lips and torched it to life. He put the lighter back down on his desk as he blew the smoke up toward the filter in the ceiling. “We’re going to have to take some extra precautions now.”
“Do you think he’ll cooperate with them?”
“Yes,” Alexei said. “Whether he wants to or not, he will. At least I hope he does, for his own sake.”
“You think he can locate us?”
“He can probably get them close. And if they hook him up to the right equipment, all they have to do is show him satellite images and they’ll know if he recognizes anything, whether he wants to cooperate or not. That’s why we have to make sure this place looks nothing like what he remembers.”
“I thought you paid someone to have the property added to some kind of black site database.”
“I did. And I just paid someone to remove it.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the very first place I’d look for someplace that somebody doesn’t want found.”
“Good point,” the girl said. “But won’t they be using images from before you activated the cloaking?”
“I doubt it. If they’re smart, they’ll take all new images of everything inside of a two hundred kilometer radius of LA using only equipment that they personally control.”
“If they’re smart,” the girl said, “they’ll anticipate your move and compare old images to new images to see if there are any dramatic inconsistencies. Or they’ll look for discrepancies between topographical measurements and visual data.”
“I said if they’re smart,” Alexei said. “Not if they’re smarter than me.”
He winked at the girl and she smiled. He sipped his tea and she looked back at the screen.
“You didn’t call me up here just to show me this, did you?”
“No.”
“I think I know what you want me to do.”
“What?”
“You want me to try to get him out, don’t you?”
Alexei rubbed his head as he looked down at the floor and exhaled smoke through his nose. “Ki, Andre is lost,” he finally said. “There is no getting him out.”
“But don’t we owe it to him to at least try?” Ki said. She took her feet down off the desk. “He’s there because of you. You’re the reason he did what he did.”
Alexei looked at the girl. “I know exactly why he did what he did,” he told her. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t get to him. Even if we knew where he was—which I seriously doubt we could even find out—there’s no way we’d be able to get in.”
“So what do we do?”
“The only thing we can do,” Alexei said. “We make sure his sacrifice wasn’t for nothing. And we make sure everything you went through wasn’t for nothing. We continue on to the next phase of our plan.”
“You mean your plan,” the girl said. “Nobody else knows what’s going on inside your head but you.”
“Ki, we’ve been over this.” He tipped his ash into the ashtray behind him. “I’ve told you more than I’ve told anyone else, but for your own good, I can’t tell you any
more.”
“Well then at least tell me why I’m here,” the girl said. “What do you want me to do if not try to rescue Dre?”
Alexei swirled the tea around the inside of the canister but didn’t take a sip. “I have a mission for you,” he said.
“What kind of mission?”
“A diplomatic one.”
The girl gave Alexei a skeptical look. “Diplomacy isn’t exactly what you trained me for,” she said. “Are you sure I’m the best choice?”
“Trust me,” Alexei said smiling. “For the type of diplomacy I’m talking about, you’re perfect.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Before Florian Lasker was relocated to secure corporate executive housing, he maintained two apartments. The first was a modern penthouse right in downtown LA with walls of curved glass panes set between arched steel trusses, a glass-shrouded plasma fire pit, and a forest of preserved birch trunks set in a substrate of smooth black river rock. The second was a two-story urban industrial loft in the Arts District with exposed ducts, a glass and steel staircase, polished and heated concrete floors, and one wall composed of over half a billion quad-color photoelectric acoustic pixels that cycled through endless textures and landscapes.
The penthouse was his official address and was reserved for friends, business associates, and dinners. The loft was for parties and girls.
Florian was having a glass extension added to the penthouse’s pool so that one corner would cantilever out over the street below and create the illusion of floating above the city. In terms of square meters, the structure would constitute the largest unsupported glass structure in the country, and possibly one of the largest in the world.
The design phase of the project had fascinated Florian, but he despised the renovation itself. Disorder was not something Florian handled well, so even though he was alone after dinner, he auto-drove east to the loft rather than to the penthouse. The freight elevator jolted to a halt on the top floor and the outer doors divided horizontally like tremendous mechanical jaws. When the mesh gate lifted, Florian stepped out into the brick hallway and saw that there was someone curled up on the floor in front of his doorway, seemingly asleep with her head propped up on a neatly folded burgundy jacket.
The first time Florian saw the girl, she was serving him an Italian espresso prior to an analyst meeting. Her big almond eyes somehow made her look vulnerable—almost frightened—and he found her afterwards and asked her if she wanted to go get a drink. They had cocktails and appetizers and then ended up back at the loft. Florian tried to remember how many times she’d been over since. Three, maybe four. It had probably been at least a month since they’d spoken.
He did not awaken the girl, but the snap of the top and bottom bolts withdrawing startled her, and the squeal of the heavy suspended steel door being mechanically pulled in its tracks made her sit up. Florian casually stepped over the body as he entered the apartment.
Although uninvited, the girl followed him inside. The door slid closed behind her and automatically bolted. The front wall was displaying a disorienting underwater scene: footage from inside a massive shark tank, dark and sleek shapes gliding through an endless indigo glow. The blue light it cast across the entire apartment was somber and cold.
Florian was in the kitchen. He had hung his leather overcoat on the back of a bar stool and was reaching up for a wine glass. The tight and impeccable weaves of his charcoal slacks and fitted pinstriped button-down gave the fabric a touch of sheen.
“You want some?” he asked.
The girl shook her head. She had stopped between the door and the kitchen. Her jacket was still outside in the hall.
She stood with her hands clasped together in front of her in a way that might have looked meditative, but her stance and expression projected anxiety. She was wearing a black top that exposed a strip of pale belly, dark jeans tucked into her high-heel boots, and a subtle diamond stud in her nose. Her straight black hair came down past her shoulders and her eyelashes just brushed her bangs.
Florian took down a single triple-glazed stemless Bordeaux glass. The spaces between the one-millimeter thick layers of borosilicate were filled with the heavy gas xenon to keep thermal conductivity from affecting the complex properties of the wine. The cabinet slid closed on its own.
Florian spoke without looking at the girl. “Kylie, what the hell are you doing here?”
The girl shrugged her petite shoulders. “I needed to talk to you.”
Florian pulled open the magnetically sealed door to the wine store and the screens above the bottles illuminated. Each compartment contained rollers for rotating its bottle, a single LED, and a camera that allowed the label to be both displayed and scanned for the purpose of keeping the database of Florian’s collection up to date. The temperature of each recess was adjusted and maintained individually and was determined by algorithms that took as inputs an array of integers representing one or more grape varieties, the latitude and longitude of the wine’s region, the age of the wine expressed in milliseconds, and several gigabytes of data downloaded from the corresponding vineyard’s archives of soil composition analyses and meteorological activity obtained through thousands of remote wireless sensors.
“You needed to talk to me,” Florian said, “so you decide to stalk me?”
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” the girl said. “You won’t return my calls.”
Florian selected a bottle and when he removed it the screen above the compartment dimmed. “Just because I haven’t doesn’t mean that I won’t.”
“OK,” the girl said. “Then you haven’t returned my calls. What’s the difference?”
Florian conceded with a shrug. He inserted the bottle into a vertical compartment which closed when he withdrew his hand. The cork was removed pneumatically and a combined aeration and filtration tube inserted itself into the neck of the bottle.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Where have you been?”
Florian recovered the bottle from the compartment and turned to give the girl a quizzical look. “What do you mean? I haven’t been anywhere.”
“This is the third night I’ve been here, and you never came home.”
“Ah,” Florian said. He nodded. The deep ruby red wine burbled and splashed as he filled the thick insulated glass too quickly. “I’ve been at my other place.”
The girl frowned. “You have another place?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not illegal,” Florian said.
“Where is it?”
Florian sipped the wine and sighed. “Is that really what you came here to talk about, Kylie? My real estate portfolio?”
The girl squinted at Florian from beneath her bangs. He threw back the remainder of the glass and began refilling it.
“Why are you such a negative person, Florian?”
Florian snickered. “I’m not negative, Kylie.” He took a sip from his second glass and leaned against the polished concrete counter. “I’m discontent. There’s a difference.”
The girl shifted her weight and crossed her arms. “Really?”
“Yes, really. Negativity is destructive. Discontent is constructive. Discontent is a catalyst. It’s what makes some of us get up off our asses and do something with our lives.”
“But why would you say it’s a good thing when it obviously makes you miserable?”
“We’re supposed to be miserable, Kylie. Christ, it drives me fucking crazy that I seem to be the only person on the entire planet who sees that. Evolution didn’t take us all the way up to this point so that we could sit around feeling fulfilled and enlightened and perpetually gratified.”
The girl moved into the kitchen. She sat up on the barstool beside the one where Florian’s coat hung and hooked her heels on the stool’s cross brace. “You really believe evolution favors discontentedness over happiness?”
“Of course that’s what I believe. What do you think drives us? What do you think makes us get out of bed in the mornings? Wh
at do you think motivates us to eat, drink, earn a living, go to sleep when we’re tired, go to the hospital when we’re hurt, fuck each other to propagate our genes? There are only two things that motivate all conscious living creatures: the promise of pleasure, and the fear of pain. The carrot and the stick. But the fear of pain is by far the more effective of the two.”
“I don’t believe that’s true,” the girl said. “I think positive reinforcement is far more powerful.”
“Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter what you think, Kylie. It’s a fact. What’s a better motivator to get you to eat? The promise of having something you enjoy, or the pain and discomfort of being hungry? Do you have any idea the kinds of things people will eat when they’re starving to death? Rats. Maggots. Rotten flesh. Each other. What’s the better motivator to get you to avoid a dark alley at night? Is it the thought that walking through a well lit and safe neighborhood might make for a more pleasant stroll, or is it the fear of being raped and having your throat slit? Fear, pain, hatred, and discontent are what advance humanity, Kylie, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, and those of us who understand and experience those emotions the most intensely are the ones who will be the most successful. If I wasn’t as discontent as I am, I’d probably be some fat fucking slob sitting on the couch watching TV all day with a beer and a bag of potato chips in my lap. But instead, I’m rich, I’m successful, I’m powerful, and I will leave my mark on this world before I die.”
He finished his wine and began filling his glass for a third time. The girl was looking down at her hands on the counter.
“I didn’t come here to argue with you or to be lectured to, Florian.”
“You asked,” Florian said. “Now are you going to tell me why you did come here or are you going to make me guess?”
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