MindWar (Nick Hall Book 3)

by Douglas E. Richards

  “Parties found guilty do have the right to appeal,” said Li in a half-hearted defense of this policy.

  “Has there ever been a single case that was overturned?”

  “Not so far, no,” admitted the general.

  “It is my understanding that Chen Han uses you for his own ends. He doesn’t care about justice. Nor about what is good for China. He has turned you into his personal dagger. I have studied you very thoroughly, General. I’ve studied your record and your writings as a younger man. My every instinct tells me you agree with my assessment, and are not happy about the harm he is doing to your country.”

  “Do you really think me unwise enough to criticize our glorious paramount leader?”

  Victor shrugged. “Why not? You know this room has been scrubbed. I’ve been scrubbed. You have my word nothing you say here will ever be repeated. And even if this were not true, who would I tell? And why would they ever believe me? It would be my word against yours.”

  Victor could see in the general’s eyes that his arguments had been persuasive. Once Li decided not to censor himself, his features darkened and he shook his head in disgust. “Our previous General Secretary, Xi Jinping, was a great leader,” he said. “Chen Han is a monster. He has had me take down men of great talent and commitment to China for little more than failing to laugh at one of his jokes. He is a ruthless psychopath and a disaster for my country.”

  Victor nodded. “Just as I thought. It is also my understanding that your boss is no better,” he said.

  Sun Qishan, Li’s boss, was not only part of the twenty-five-member Politburo, but one of only seven members on its powerful Standing Committee.

  “And I’m right about you, aren’t I?” continued Victor. “You care deeply about your country and your people. We both know you would make a far better leader than either Sun Qishan or Chen Han.”

  “What of it?” said Li in disgust. “Any rational man would know my chances of rising to the Politburo are nonexistent.”

  “But if you were a member, do you believe you could make up for some of the atrocities you’ve had to commit in the name of your president? Do you think you could do good for your people?”

  “Yes I do. I also think that if this hotel room were a spaceship, I could fly it to the moon. But that’s not going to happen either.”

  “Have you ever considered taking Sun Qishan down? Through assassination or catching him being disloyal to Chen Han? If you did this, especially the latter, you’d be in a good position to assume Sun Qishan’s Politburo post. Then, if you waited a few years and gathered allies, you could assassinate Chen Han and become the leader of the People’s Republic.”

  “My patience is wearing very thin,” growled Li. “You paint a nice fantasy, but that’s all it is.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Have you ever considered killing Sun Qishan? Or Chen Han, for that matter?”

  “Of course!” spat Li in contempt. “How could I not? If there were any chance of success, I would have done so already. But I am stuck trying to do what good I can from my current position, trying to root out actual corruption and ensuring good men don’t hit any landmines.”

  “How do you protect them?”’

  “I tip them off to change certain behaviors when this might help, and hide information from Chen Han I know would incite him against them.”

  Victor couldn’t believe how well this was going. His choice of Li Jeng had been even more perfect than he had known. “You’ve called my proposal a fantasy,” he said, “but I am here to assure you that I can make it a reality, my friend.”

  “How? With your implants? You think you can work things out so I’m seen as a hero for finding you and acquiring this technology? It won’t happen. Or do you think using them myself, accessing the Internet with my thoughts, will suddenly give me the magical powers needed to bring down two of the most powerful and protected men in the world? Because brain surfing is nice, it really is. And I can see the benefit. But it changes the basic equation very little.”

  A grin spread across Victor’s face. “I don’t think you’re seeing the possibilities, General. If you were the beneficiary of a set of implants, there would be no stopping you. Especially you. Especially in the role you’re in.”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more.”

  “Then allow me to demonstrate,” said Victory smugly. He nodded toward a computer tablet resting on an oak dresser behind the general. “Can I assume that belongs to you?”

  Li looked confused. “It does.”

  “Can you get it, please?”

  The general retrieved the tablet and returned to his seat, never taking his eyes from Victor. “Now what?”

  “While we’ve been talking,” said Victor, “I’ve sent you an e-mail, with a link to one of my cloud accounts.”

  Li glanced down at his computer and noted that this was true. “I do have an e-mail from you,” he said, “but you must have sent it earlier on a time-delay, or had someone else send it.”

  “I assure you that I sent it just a minute ago,” said Victor, understanding the man’s confusion. Li’s men had removed Victor’s phone and everything else on his person bigger than a flea.

  Li’s jaw dropped in dismay. “You have a set of implants in your brain right now, don’t you?” he said, having finally caught on. “I’ve been a fool,” he added. “I should have guessed this from the start.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, General. When you have no experience with the technology, BrainWeb seems abstract, theoretical. The beauty of the implants is that they are hidden, an extra brain you can use during meetings like this one with no one knowing. As you said, internal computers that are hundreds of times more capable than a desktop or phone. And since they are rarer than unicorns right now, and just as mythical, no one thinks to guess that a visitor might have them installed. Even when they’re the subject of discussion, as you’ve just demonstrated.”

  Victor paused to let this sink in. “With this being said,” he continued finally, “I think you should open my e-mail message and hit the link, General.”

  “I will,” said Jeng Li. “And I am more impressed than I was,” he admitted. “You can multitask without others knowing. Conduct research during discussions to appear smarter than you are. But on the whole, I continue to be underwhelmed.”

  “Hit the link, my friend, and I’m sure your views will change.”

  The general complied without another word and a video box appeared on his tablet and began to play in ultra-high definition.

  Li’s face paled and he let out an inadvertent gasp.

  Because he was the star of the video.

  He was sitting where he was now, holding a gun in his lap. As soon as the video began there could be no doubt it was recorded only minutes earlier.

  “Chen Han is a monster,” the general heard himself say on the screen. “He has had me take down men of great talent and commitment to China for little more than failing to laugh at one of his jokes. He is a ruthless psychopath and a disaster for my country.”

  Li’s eyes widened in horror as the video jumped to a point later in the conversation. This time it was Victor’s voice coming from his tablet, although the video footage was still solely of himself. Of course it was, he realized, since Victor’s eyes must have served as the camera.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” his visitor was saying. “Have you ever considered killing Sun Qishan? Or Chen Han, for that matter?”

  “Of course!” Li watched himself respond. “How could I not? If there were any chance of success, I would have done so already.”

  With this, the video ended, and General Li Jeng couldn’t have looked more horrified had the footage been from the near future and displayed his own bloody dismemberment, which had suddenly become a certainty.

  6

  Li raised the gun from his lap and pointed it at Victor’s head. “Delete this immediately or die!” he shouted. “Now!”

  “Of course,”
said Victor reasonably. Not only had he expected this reaction, he had counted on it. “It’s deleted,” he announced a moment later. “And it was my only copy. Hit the link again and see.”

  The general did and quickly satisfied himself that the link no longer returned the video.

  Li took a relieved breath, but his cloak of anxiety had not disappeared, which was no surprise to Victor. How could he not still be feeling exposed and violated, unable to eliminate the possibility that his visitor was lying about the existence of additional copies.

  “Please,” said Victor warmly, “put your mind at ease. I gave you my word that our conversation was in confidence, and it will remain so, no matter what.” He allowed himself a shallow smile. “But I see that my little demonstration was effective.”

  The general didn’t respond, but it was clear the wheels in his head were spinning.

  “Just to review,” said Victor. “You and your men would have bet their lives that this room was clean, and so was I. You had no idea I was harboring implants, and no idea how dangerous this would be to you if I was. Because of this you felt relaxed. Comfortable enough to be goaded into disclosing information that would get you killed. You failed to remember that a technology capable of converting Internet data into something a user can see and hear must also be able to do the reverse. I have become a living, breathing video camera. I can record everything I see and hear and instantly send it to the cloud for storage. Or to a tablet computer,” he added pointedly.

  “Perhaps your proposal is more rational than I had thought,” said Li with a new respect in his voice. He lowered his gun and returned it to its holster.

  “I can implant these in your brain, General. I have an advanced machine that immobilizes your head and installs them with incredible precision and with very few neurons damaged in the process. Then you become a living recorder. You suddenly have a photographic memory, can use BrainWeb to call up a replay or details of anything you’ve ever read, or seen, or heard. And you can goad people into saying something they’ll regret, and then make them regret it. They don’t have to know how you managed to get incriminating video, just that you managed it. And then you own them.”

  “But if the incriminating evidence always stems from me, wouldn’t—”

  “It won’t,” interrupted Victor. “I can offer you twenty sets of implants. For you and nineteen of your closest allies. All at no cost. You get to extend your reach and build a formidable team. They get access to groundbreaking technology and the chance to be in the inner circle of China’s next paramount leader, both of which will send their careers skyrocketing.”

  “You’ve really thought this through.”

  “I have. And another benefit you will come to appreciate is that you can set the implants to communicate with each member of your team instantly, and secretly, through the Web. You can program the implants to take incoming messages from each other and convert them to auditory signals such that the messages seem to be spoken by members of your team, in their own voices. Virtual telepathy. With two of you in a room, you can basically talk to each other, strategize, in the middle of a conversation with a third, without the third being any the wiser.”

  Li may have been slow to grasp some of the possibilities the implants made available, but the benefits of blackmail and of being able to basically communicate telepathically with any of his nineteen closest allies was very clear to him.

  “But if just one of these men cross me,” he pointed out, “the game is over. I think I have nineteen men I can trust, but there is never a way to know for sure.”

  “I’ve thought about this, as well. I can load an extra software module into the implants. One command from you, sent from your implants or any computer in the world, and the user dies from what looks like a stroke.”

  “Are you really suggesting I put a ticking time bomb in the brains of my closest allies without their knowledge?”

  “No. With their knowledge. I’m suggesting that after the implants are in their brains, you tell them exactly how you’ve armed them. It’s important they know. The kill switch isn’t for punishing them after they’ve already betrayed you. You want this to act as a deterrent so they never do.”

  Victor took a sip of tea and allowed this to sink in. “They are loyal to you and have everything to gain from your rise to the top, so your insurance policy in their heads shouldn’t worry them. If it were me, I’d set it up so the command to trigger their deaths is automatically sent every few days. Unless you’re alive to actively stop it each time. That way, your inner circle has a strong vested interest in seeing that you survive and prosper.”

  Li shook his head. “You must think I’m very stupid,” he said. “While I’m holding the detonator on them, you’ll be holding the detonator on me. Is that the deal?”

  “No. Your set will be clean. I assume you can find a software expert who will keep your secrets on fear of death. Or one you don’t mind killing. Have him take a look. He’ll find a main software core on all twenty sets that he’ll tell you he can’t get at, that is the best protected he’s ever seen. That would be Alex Altschuler’s work. Separately, on nineteen sets, there will be an offshoot of code, a bubble, that is unprotected. Software that I added myself. He’ll be able to verify that the activation of this code will instruct the implants to cause a stroke.”

  “And this software expert will be able to verify that my set is clean?”

  “Yes!” said Victor emphatically. “Believe me, General, I don’t want to control you. I don’t want your money. I want to be your silent partner.”

  Li considered. “And what do you get out of this partnership? Do you somehow imagine yourself as co-leader of China?”

  “Not at all,” said Victor, shaking his head. “I have no interest in meddling in your affairs. All I ask is for an occasional favor or two now and then from the most powerful man in China. A favor that I would only expect you to grant if it doesn’t compromise your interests, or those of China. And I propose that we share intelligence to our mutual benefit, beginning now, and then continuing once you’ve, ah . . . ascended the throne.”

  “Intelligence?”

  “Yes, in certain instances my intelligence-gathering capabilities exceed even China’s. But I have a very narrow focus, whereas your intelligence apparatus is many thousands of times bigger. For reasons I won’t go into, it would give me great satisfaction to weaken America: culturally, economically, militarily, you name it. Something that can benefit China as well.”

  There was silence in the room for almost a full minute as Li thought through everything that had been said. Victor sipped at his tea and waited patiently for Li’s next words.

  “You make an interesting proposal,” said General Li finally, an understatement of epic proportions. “I will give this additional thought and get back to you soon, with either an answer or more questions.”

  Victor fought the urge to grin. He had no doubt the general would agree, but just didn’t want to seem too eager. Not only was Li Jeng smart and ambitious, he was convinced the man now running his country was a monster. And Victor had shown him how easily the implants could be used to get a man’s testicles in a vise, although he probably would have preferred a demonstration using someone else’s testicles.

  “Take all the time you need, my friend,” said Victor pleasantly. “Take all the time you need.”

  PART 2

  Trojan Horse Taskforce

  7

  The driver of the silver GMC Yukon showed the proper credentials and the SUV was waved into Hill Air Force Base, just south of Ogden, Utah, arriving at its destination after a leisurely ninety-minute drive. While the Yukon looked like a standard civilian vehicle—other than being one of the largest SUVs on the road—it had cost the government just over eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  Fifty-three thousand of this had gone to a GMC dealer, and the other eight hundred thousand to an outfit that had layered enough bulletproof glass and hidden armor onto the ve
hicle that it had been nicknamed the Cockroach, since it was all but impossible to kill. Unlike its namesake insect friends, the Yukon couldn’t survive a nuclear war, but it also couldn’t be pierced with conventional weapons and was so heavy it could effortlessly shrug off a collision with any vehicle short of a tank.

  The man being transported, Nick Hall, warranted this level of protection—and more. Only President Timothy Cochran and a few handfuls of others even knew that Hall was alive, or could recognize him given the subtle but effective facial prosthetics he wore when in public. But those who were in this rarified loop knew that Nick Hall was, without question, America’s most valuable asset in the war on terror—and this activity wasn’t even part of his day job.

  Only seven months earlier, General Justin Girdler had orchestrated one of the most brilliant intelligence coups in history. He had placed ten thousand sets of BrainWeb implants with an America-hating arms and technology dealer named Victor, a man of legendary guile and caution, in such a way that the man didn’t suspect he was being used as a pawn.

  The implants had been modified so that whatever a user saw, heard, or even thought was secretly transmitted to a computer system with massive storage capacity, effectively turning ten thousand of America’s greatest enemies into human-sized electronic bugs, giving US intelligence unprecedented insight into their activities and networks.

  Shortly after this had been accomplished, Girdler had arranged with the president to forge and fund an organization so off the books it made the inner workings of Area 51 seem as secret as the recipe for making ice cubes. This taskforce, code-named THT, operated from inside a large warehouse an hour out of Salt Lake City, with its back against a mountain.