by Sean Ellis
He hugged her tight. “Not even God could stop me. Okay, well maybe God, but-”
“It is you!” This incredulous exclamation was from another female voice, and King glanced up to find Felice standing a few steps behind them. “You sure know how to make an entrance.”
King gave her a tight smile. “I know how to make a pretty good exit, too. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Felice nodded eagerly and strode toward the elevator doors. Sara seemed unwilling to let go of him, but he gently loosened her grip while still holding her hand in his. “Let’s get you home, Dr. Fogg.”
But suddenly his legs were swept from beneath him and fell backward, crashing heavily onto the floor. The impact sent a wave of pain through his body, aggravating a host of scrapes and bruises that had not yet begun to heal, and for a moment, he could only lay motionless, struggling to breathe. That moment was long enough for his attacker to gain the upper hand.
A hideous specter materialized above him; a familiar face-Fulbright’s face-on one side, and on the other, a swollen mass of destroyed flesh, weeping blood and serous fluid. His hands sought out King’s throat and closed, shutting off the flow of blood to King’s brain and the exchange of air to his lungs.
King clawed at Fulbright’s choke hold, but could not gain an iota of relief. Dark spots started to swim across his vision, but through the descending night, he saw Sara hammering at the rogue agent’s face with her fists in a desperate effort to free King. Nothing worked. Fulbright was almost certainly mortally wounded, certainly suffering incomprehensible pain, but none of that mattered. There was no trace of sanity to be found in his remaining eye, but the force empowering his grip was singular in nature. He wanted King dead, and nothing would prevent that.
He let go of Fulbright’s stranglehold and with fumbling fingers, found the hilt of his KA-BAR. Desperately, he slid the blade from its sheath and stabbed out blindly. The knife struck something hard and then twisted out his grip, as King felt his consciousness start to go.
“Stop!”
The commanding voice was barely audible through the roaring in King’s ears, but miraculously the darkness began to lift. He drew in a painful breath, welcoming the restored flow of blood to his brain, and struggled to sit up.
Fulbright squatted nearby, his one good eye gazing blankly into space. His injuries continued to bleed, including a new one just below his collarbone, where the hilt of King’s KA-BAR protruded, but he seemed unaware of any of it. Covered in blood, he looked almost exactly like…
King turned to meet Felice’s gaze and understood in an instant what had happened, what she had done. He searched her eyes, but saw no trace of the guilt or despair that had marked her earlier. She had found some untapped reservoir of strength; the strength to do what needed to be done, and to make an ability out of her liability.
She was probably more dangerous than ever before.
“Thank you,” he croaked.
Felice just nodded.
Sara helped him up and held onto him as they moved to the elevator doors. Sara pushed the button calling the car, but nothing happened. The button didn’t light up and there was no sound of machinery in the emptiness beyond.
“Graham,” King said. “He must have shut them off to strand us down here.”
“Or it’s Brainstorm,” Sara replied.
King cast an inquisitive glance her way and listened intently as she quickly recounted what Fulbright had told her about Brainstorm and her own experiences with the disembodied electronic voice. As she related her suspicions about Brainstorm being a sentient computer, King recalled Deep Blue’s metacorporation conspiracy theory, and then he remembered something Graham had told him: subbasement level two was the computer room.
Surely it can’t be that easy, King thought.
He was right.
“King, do you read?” Deep Blue’s voice scratched in his ears. He sounded a little more frantic than usual.
He keyed his mic. “This is King. Send it.”
“I’ve just detected a massive cruise missile launch, targeted at your coordinates.”
“Missiles? Whose?”
“Ours. They were launched from a naval missile frigate. I’m still trying to identify the boat and figure out who ordered the strike, but there are Tomahawks inbound. You’ve got about ten minutes to get out of there.”
“Easier said than done.” He released the mic key and quickly relayed the bad news to the others.
Sara’s eyes widened, and then she abruptly crossed the room and took a seat in front of a computer desk. “Brainstorm, are you there?” When no answer came, she leaned over the keyboard and tapped out a message.
A moment later, an electronic voice filled the room. “What is your request, Dr. Fogg?”
“Are you responsible for the missiles that are heading here?”
“I am.”
“How did you manage that?” King asked, not knowing whether Brainstorm would respond to him. “Did you hack into the Defense Department?”
“It was not necessary to infiltrate that computer network. I merely sent a priority message to the United States military Central Command, authenticated with Fulbright’s credentials, stating that this location is a secret terrorist training camp.”
“Why did you do that?” Sara asked, a hint of desperation in her voice.
“He’s just covering his tracks,” King supplied.
“You are only partially correct, Mr. Sigler. I am also ensuring that you do not survive to further compromise my activities. There is a 72.5% probability that you will make destroying the Brainstorm network a priority, if you are permitted to live.”
“There’s no ‘probable’ about it.” King said. “I am going to take you apart.”
“That is unlikely. The probability that you will survive the missile strike is only 23.2%.”
“Brainstorm, you can’t do this,” Sara pleaded. “You can’t…you must not allow Felice to be killed.”
“Please explain.”
“You already know that Felice was affected by something in that cave, and you know what she can do now, right?”
“Anecdotal reports have been received and evaluated. There is evidence to suggest that Miss Carter is linked to incidences of evolutionary regression. The destruction of the facility will eliminate that threat.”
“No it won’t. Felice isn’t just a carrier of some virus. Her consciousness is quantum entangled with that of the entire human race. If you kill her, it will cause evolutionary regression on a global scale. You’ll be responsible for the downfall of humanity.”
King searched Sara’s eyes and saw that she was deadly serious.
“You are mistaken,” Brainstorm replied.
King thought it odd that there was no calculation of probabilities; Brainstorm was exhibiting the very human tendency of denial. “She’s not,” he declared. “And you know it. You have to stop this. If Felice dies, humanity dies, and who will you rule over then?”
“That is a chance I will have to take. Good-bye.”
29.
Sara continued pleading with Brainstorm, but there was no answer and King knew that salvation would not come from that quarter. He opened a line to Deep Blue. “How long have we got?”
“Estimated time to target is six minutes, thirty seconds…mark.”
“I don’t suppose you can ask the navy to self-destruct those missiles. You know, maybe say ‘pretty-please.’” He tried to sound lighthearted, but he was beginning to worry. In the past, the only people who would miss his passing were the team, who shared the risk and understood it and his mother, who he now realized may or may not have cared about his welfare after all. But now there was Fiona, whose parents died when she was young and whose grandmother was killed in front of her during the attack on the Siletz reservation. She’d put on a tough-girl routine when he left, but he knew his death would affect her profoundly. He’d considered retiring from the field for her, but she’d actually convinced him to stay ac
tive. “If you don’t fight,” she’d said, “the world would be a bad place to live.” So here he was fighting, and, it seemed, about to make Fiona regret that little speech.
“You know I can’t.” Deep Blue sounded distraught. He knew the stakes for King were higher than ever. “Believe me, I’m trying everything. Director Boucher is working the official channels for us and Aleman is trying to hack his way in, disable the missiles, or change their trajectories.”
Dominick Boucher was the director of the CIA, Deep Blue’s friend and confidant, and the one man who knew everything about Chess Team’s new black ops gig. After all, he’s the one who set it up. Lewis Aleman was the team’s genius techie. An injury took him out of the field, but he’s been waging cyber war for the team since. If anyone could take care of the missiles it was them, but stopping several missiles midflight was no easy task, especially when some of the people in danger don’t officially exist.
“I know you’ll do your best. I’m gonna sign off now. If you don’t hear from me in seven minutes…well, you know.”
He severed the connection and then turned to Sara and Felice. “Graham was down here with us. Now he’s gone. There has to be another way out. Find it.”
Sara immediately pointed to a door set against one wall. “I thought that might be a closet, but it’s locked.”
“I have a key.” King loaded a Beehive shell into the SCAR’s FN40GL attachment, and took aim at the doorknob. The gun thundered and the entire lock mechanism disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and metal. The door swung back to reveal a landing with a stairs going both up and down. “Go!”
They hastened up the dark stairwell and emerged a few moments later in the elevator foyer on the first floor of the villa. In the distance, there was the roar of a jet engine; not incoming cruise missiles, but the Gulfstream V taking off, presumably with Graham on board.
Sara steered them toward the front door, and they ran from the house, across the courtyard, and through the gate out into the desert. They were still running when the explosions began.
EPILOGUE
Afar District, Ethiopia-One week later
The Old Mother made one more journey to the elephant graveyard.
Felice had spent the week resting and recuperating from injuries she hadn’t even realized she’d suffered. Her deepest wounds of course were not physical in nature, and some of them were only now manifesting themselves in the form of chronic insomnia and panic attacks. She had been referred to a specialist in treating post traumatic stress disorder, but deep down she felt there was more to it than that. She knew that she carried within her the ability to undo hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution-to utterly destroy human civilization.
That was a lot for one person to carry.
Good thing that I’m not just one person, she thought. There’s two of us in here.
But how much longer would that last? The Old Mother’s memories were a source of comfort and strength to her, but sometimes she felt that her connection to the past was slipping. She thought about Sara’s theory of quantum entanglement; it was as good an explanation as any other she’d entertained. Was it possible to become disentangled?
She hoped so.
“We’re just about ready,” Jack Sigler announced.
Distracted from her thoughts, she glanced over to where Sigler and Sara were gazing out across the floor of the Rift Valley, to the cave entrance leading into the elephant graveyard, and then went over to join them. Sigler was hunched over a small laptop computer, holding a small joystick controller. The computer display showed the interior of the cave, and when he adjusted the stick, the image on the screen moved.
But nothing else moved in the elephant graveyard. There was no sign of her former co-workers; the men and women who had been transformed into mindless drones were nowhere to be found. Even though she knew in her heart that she was in no way responsible for what had happened to the Nexus team, Felice felt a pang of guilt whenever she thought about them. She hoped that they had at last found peace.
“Coming out now,” Sigler announced.
Felice looked to the cave exit, about a hundred yards away, and saw what looked like a miniature bulldozer come rolling out of the opening.
Sigler called it “the Wolverine.” The remote controlled military utility robot moved around on tracked wheels, like a battle tank or bulldozer, and was equipped with several surveillance cameras and a powerful manipulator arm that could lift almost two hundred pounds. The Wolverine was primarily used by the military for explosive ordinance removal, but Sigler had used it for almost exactly the opposite purpose.
“Do we really have to do this?” she asked, not for the first time.
Sara nodded grimly. “We can’t be sure that the cave doesn’t contain some form of the virus that Manifold and Brainstorm were looking for, and we can’t take the chance that it might be inadvertently released.”
“I know you’re right, but I can’t help but think about Moses, and his dream to use the ivory in the cave to make Africa a better place.”
“It was a noble idea,” Sigler said. “But if history has taught us anything, it’s that the discovery of some new source of wealth almost never makes things better. Look how quickly his dream was perverted by those rebel fighters.”
“And of course, every single one of those elephant carcasses is a potential source of the contagion,” Sara added. “To say nothing of the possibility of further quantum contamination.”
Felice sighed. “I know that you’re both right. But what’s the answer? If we can’t use something like this to make the world a better place, what’s left?”
“You focus on what you’ve already got,” Sigler answered. “Use your skills, your strengths, your passions…that’s all any of us can do.”
Felice considered this. With everything that had happened, she had lost sight of the simple fact that she was a scientist. Her interest in genetics had grown from a childhood dream of discovering a cure for cancer. Maybe it was time to return to that dream.
Sigler steered the Wolverine across the open expanse and drove it up the ramp of the waiting CH-47 Chinook helicopter that had brought them here. He closed the laptop and tucked in under one arm. “Time to go.”
# # #
The twin-rotors lifted the massive Chinook into the sky above the Great Rift Valley and the site of the elephant graveyard. The helicopter circled the area, gaining vertical distance with each pass, until the pilot called back to let King know that they had reached the desired altitude.
King flipped off the red safety cap on the remote triggering device, and then took Felice’s hand and placed her finger on the switch. “Would you like to do the honors?”
He could see the hesitation in her eyes. Even though the cave had been the source of unimaginable horrors for her, the uncertainty of what might happen next probably seemed even more terrifying. But King knew well that the first step toward healing was to get some closure.
He nodded to her. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She smiled weakly, and then pressed the switch.
The device sent out a radio signal that was picked up instantly by a receiver unit on the ground. The receiver in turn sent a small electrical charge surging through several hundred feet of copper wire that disappeared into the cave opening. That charge detonated a small conventional explosive, which scattered a cloud of powdered aluminum high above the maze of elephant skeletons.
A fraction of a second later, the fuel-saturated air ignited.
The thermobaric bomb transformed the elephant graveyard into a miniature sun. The bones and ivory teeth of ancient elephants, crushed to dust by the initial blast front, were subsequently incinerated in a firestorm that exceeded 5,000° Fahrenheit. The force of the explosion hammered into the domed ceiling, opening enormous cracks in the stone. An instant later, the vacuum created by rapid cooling of the scorched air, caused the entire cavern to implode.
From high above, King watched a cloud of dust ri
sing, the result of the shockwave traveling through hundreds of feet of rock. When it cleared, a new crater was visible on the landscape of the Great Rift Valley.
The elephant graveyard had ceased to exist.
›››Your services are required, General.
I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.
›››The Brainstorm network remains operational.
Sure. I just thought you would be keeping a low profile. At least until some of the heat dies down.
›››Recent events have not compromised operational efficiency.
Maybe not for you. But I need to be very discreet. Everyone is under suspicion now.
›››There is no cause for concern. Key network personnel have been positioned to minimize the consequences of this investigation. However, no external action is demanded of you, General.
What then?
›››Information about the man who caused the recent disruption. I want to know everything about Jack Sigler.
Sigler? I didn’t realize he was behind all this. It makes sense now.
›››You are familiar with him?
I am. Look, it’s not safe for me to do this right now, but I’ll put some information together. Contact me in a week to set up a dead drop.
›››There is a 93.9% probability that Sigler will pursue further action against Brainstorm. The need for this information is urgent.
I’ll get it to you.
Graham Brown read the text message reply. He deleted it without responding and put his smartphone away.
A week after the destruction of the facility site in Algeria…a week after Jack Sigler had showed up to ruin the most audacious enterprise he had ever conceived…he found that he still could not keep the anger and desperation from creeping into his Brainstorm communiques. He had spent decades cultivating the myth that Brainstorm was something larger-than-life; a sentient, even omniscient computer, and not just an ordinary- well, maybe extraordinary -gambler from Atlantic City with an uncanny ability to accurately assess the probabilities of almost any event.
