“It makes more sense to me,” she said. “He had a high rank in the Big Circle Boys, and a lot of those guys were former Red Guards who got sent up after Mao died. They could have taught him a few things about how to make people talk.”
“I see.” I doubted anything the Red Guards knew would be a real improvement over FBI interrogation methods, but it would probably be more to my employer’s tastes to have it handled that way. Fingernails and toenails pulled out where simple verbal manipulation would have done the job. So much for staring directly into people’s souls.
“She stayed strong,” said the woman. “Rest in power, Maria.”
“How do you know she stayed strong?”
“Isn’t it obvious? You weren’t exposed, or else you would already know all about the Ja Lama’s interrogation methods from first-hand experience. Now what about the other one?” she said.
“Kumar? He’s okay. I uncovered him by accident, but I didn’t expose him. We’re working together now.”
“Working together? What do you mean?” Her voice was harsh.
“He’s not a snitch,” I said. “I’m not even in the FBI anymore.”
“You’re forgetting that I’ve been reading all of Emily Alvin’s correspondence with you for months now. You may not be officially employed, but you’re being supported and protected by your old masters. If Kumar is passing you any information about our operations…”
“He isn’t. We’re collaborating on one thing only, and that is finding out what Vitalius Kohl is up to so we can stop it.”
“And how do you think you’re going to do that, exactly?”
“I don’t know yet because I don’t know exactly what Vitalius is doing. He’s a cagey individual. When he does something that gives away what he’s really up to, I’m supposed to pass the info on to the FBI so they can raid the place. I’ll make sure Kumar isn’t charged with anything.”
“As always, you cling to the delusion that there is anything the State can or will do about Vitalius Kohl. Even though his brother is a United States Senator, you insist on believing that the Justice Department will charge him.”
“If they’d charge a Senator with a crime, they’d charge a Senator’s brother without a second thought. And they’ve charged Senators before. You’re too cynical.”
“And you’re naive,” she said. “But as naive as you are, I don’t believe you’re loyal to Vitalius Kohl.”
“Why would you ever have thought I was?” I asked her incredulously.
“We weren’t sure what to make of it when we found out you were working for Kohl now, and some of us thought you might be responsible for our people on the inside going silent.”
“Maria Guttierez is probably dead, but I would have saved her if I could. I’m still doing everything I can to protect Kumar. And that’s the truth.”
“If I thought you were loyal to Vitalius Kohl, I would have killed you right here. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think you want to take him down as much as we do, however misguided your approach may be.” She removed the gun.
“Come into Bill Barnar’s office with me. We need to talk.”
Chapter 33
“You’re bringing him in here?” said Bill. “Don’t let him see your face. I’ve known this guy as long as I’ve known anyone and I don’t trust him.”
The woman with the gun was still behind me, although she no longer had her weapon on me. She directed me toward a chair by pushing more or less gently on my arm, and I sat down. Bill reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a black ski mask – interesting that he would keep that handy. He tossed it to the woman behind me, and she caught it, then he stood up from behind his desk and left the room to wait on customers. The woman walked around and sat down at the desk, now hidden behind the ski mask. But I could see more of her face than I ever had before – enough to know that her skin was dark, for instance.
“Okay,” she said. “We’re not going to help the FBI, but it’s important to make sure that we don’t get in each other’s way. And it’s even more important to stop Kohl. As a gesture of good faith, I need you to answer a question for me.”
“Go ahead.”
“What level of interest do they have in us at this point? Are we potential subjects of an investigation?”
I wasn’t supposed to answer this sort of question. In fact, I could be prosecuted and put in prison for it, and this woman probably knew that. But I had been breaking the rules for such a long time by this point that the whole concept was pretty much meaningless to me by now.
“You know as well as I do that you could be investigated,” I said. “You’re an armed vigilante group, and you’ve committed several murders.”
“Murders?” she asked coldly. “And what do you call it when you do the same?”
“I call it murder,” I said. “I’m a vigilante too.”
A long pause, then, “Okay. But there’s no open investigation into us?”
“None that I’m aware of, which doesn’t mean much. My boss did tell me they’d looked into you at one point when they thought you might have done the Ann Arbor fires.”
“That wasn’t us.”
“They know that now. But they stayed interested in you because you were stockpiling weapons. They probably would have kept looking into your activities if you hadn’t gone underground. At some point, the resources it would have taken to find out more about you must have exceeded their interest level.”
“So you know who we are, then?” she asked me.
“The name I was given was the Sōhei Faction. Militant Buddhist anarchist monks or something.”
She chuckled quietly. “Is that how they see us? Alright. That’s close enough. The real Sōhei weren’t exactly monks except in name. But that will do.”
“You need to give me something now,” I said. “That’s how it works.”
“I can tell you who the Ja Lama really is,” she said.
“A Mongolian gangster named Khünbish Chinbat. One of the Big Circle Boys,” I replied. She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.
“Well, okay. That’s not exactly common knowledge. You may be a detective after all.”
“I’m a guy with a laptop. What I really want to know is what Kohl is up to. I only know three things so far. It has something to do with virtual reality, it has something to do with Chöd, and it has something to do with tungsten.”
I knew a little bit more than that of course, but why tell her the truth?
“It doesn’t have anything to do with Chöd,” she said with confidence.
“Kohl says it does. He says the Quod Glasses will give people an experience of Quantum Chöd, allowing them to achieve enlightenment almost immediately.”
“Do you know what Chöd is?” she asked.
“Tibetan Tantra. Spooky Goth death metal Buddhism.”
“You’re not a very reverent person, are you?” she asked.
“Are you?” I said.
“I can be. Chöd is one type of Tibetan Tantra – you got that much right.”
“But Kohl’s version is not legit?”
“Did it sound legit when he told you about it?”
“No, not really. It sounded absolutely deranged.”
“Chöd is not deranged. It’s a serious meditative practice. Kohl couldn’t possibly be less interested in anything like that.”
“He sure talks about it enough for someone who isn’t interested in it.”
“But where does he always end up when he talks about it?”
“I get your point,” I said. “He always circles back around to his obsession.”
“Cleansing the planet of corruption and ending the Kali Yuga,” she said. “By killing as many people as possible.”
I nodded. “So whatever it is he’s really doing here, it must be intended to end with mass destruction somehow. And virtual reality headsets are not going to do that.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “He’s still planning to commit mas
s murder. And if he’s throwing resources at the project on this kind of scale, he must be planning something much, much bigger than what happened in Hennington.”
“Hennington was supposed to be much bigger than it was.”
“We couldn’t get there,” she said. “We lost him for a while after we wiped out the rogue UT faction in DC. By the time we figured out that he was in Hennington, you had already done whatever it was you did there.”
“I kept it from being a lot worse,” I said. “That’s what I did. But he got what he wanted out of it anyway. Are you sure this thing will be bigger than Hennington?”
“No question about it,” she said. “He chose a small and isolated community like Hennington for a reason – he was deliberately limiting the scale to match the appropriate stage in his own agenda. Now that stage is over, and he’s going to move on to a bigger one.”
“How do you know so much about him?” I asked her.
“Never mind that. We’ll check into the question of why Kohl would want so much tungsten. But there’s one more thing.”
She reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper.
“Take this,” she said. “We’ll need a secure communication channel.”
I took the paper, and read what was written on it: Okuni_sagae, Tr54368*, &7ytHgfd#.
“The first one is a shinobimail address – encrypted email. The other two are passwords.”
“You need two passwords to get into this email account?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “It’s much more secure. Your boss won’t be able to read what you’re sending us, or what we’re sending you. But be careful anyway.”
“Believe me, I will be. I don’t want Khünbish Chinbat working me over.”
Chapter 34
I thought about the whole thing some more on the plane back to Reno, watching the thick gray clouds pass by below us. The more I thought about it, the more I thought the key to the whole thing must be Kumar’s satellite, not the Quod Glasses as such. I didn’t know how Vitalius could possibly kill anybody by sending up a huge amount of tungsten in a satellite, but there must be some way.
“You seem thoughtful,” said Vitalius. He was sitting right next to me in first class.
“I’m just pondering,” I said. “Some of this new hardcore stuff I’ve been listening to is so intense. Rise of the North Star and that sort of thing. It makes punk rock seem almost… innocent. Like the Good Old Days when everything was simpler and happier. You know?”
“Indeed I do. But then, I’ve been pursuing the darker alleyways of music for many years. You’ve only just started that journey.”
It was amazing and disturbing to me how good I was getting at this. I could answer any question with a flawless lie, and I didn’t even need any time to think about it. I was fooling Father himself, and doing it consistently.
“When we get out to headquarters,” he said, “we’ll review the projects again. But this time is different. I want you to spot something for me.”
“Spot something for you?” I said. “What’s that?”
“I’m not convinced we’ve caught all the spies, so we’re going to beat the grass to catch the snakes. Pick any one employee from upstairs and have your security team snatch them. If there’s still an infiltrator up there, we’ll panic them into making a mistake.”
The prospect of handing a completely innocent person over to the Ja Lama was a step too far, even with the stakes as high as this. My stomach lurched.
“Have my security team snatch them?” I asked. “And then what?”
“Oh, just hold them until everyone else goes home on the bus and then fire them with severance. Contingent on total and enduring silence, of course.”
I breathed out, relieved that Vitalius wasn’t going to push this one too far.
“What’s the matter, Gavin? Feeling sensitive?” he asked. When I turned to look, he was grinning.
When we reached our corporate headquarters hours later, the sacrificial victim turned out to be the woman who ran the robot project. Why did I pick her? Because I liked her, and I had no idea what was going to happen here by the time everything was said and done. By firing her now, I might even be saving the woman’s life. That didn’t make her much happier with the whole thing, though. When Jesse and Barbara grabbed her by both arms and hauled her off, she yelled like an animal about to be butchered.
“Mr. Kohl!” she screamed. “Mr. Kohl! You can’t let them do this to me! Please!”
“You let me down,” he said coldly, “and you let yourself down.” She screamed the whole way to the interrogation room, where a company lawyer was waiting to offer her a generous severance package and a strict non-disclosure agreement.
“That woman is really terrified,” said Vitalius quietly. “That should make an impression. On to the Quod Glasses project!”
We walked through the antiseptic hallways of the Quod Corporation headquarters, but something had happened to the pampered and satisfied staff Vitalius used to have. People looked down at the floor when we walked by as if they were afraid the security team would grab them too. They walked quickly past and didn’t look at us.
“Why is everyone so nervous?” asked Vitalius disingenuously.
“They know we detained Maria Guttierez,” said Barbara. “They’re wondering why no one ever saw her again.”
“Is that so? What a nest of gossips.”
Vitalius entered in the code for the virtual reality project doorway, and we went inside.
“How are we doing, Ujjal? Do you have good news for me?”
The Sikh engineer turned to look at him and handed over a pair of the Quod Glasses.
“In fact I do, sir. A working prototype. Completely immersive and convincing – as if you were there in the flesh. Of course, right now it just shows this building from outside.”
“Have you tested it for bugs?” asked Vitalius.
“That’s a long process,” said Ujjal. “Months at the least. But these work.”
“If they work, then we’ll send them to production immediately. There’s no need to wait. I’ll get the marketing department in Georgia on it. The glasses need to be on store shelves two weeks before the launch.”
“The satellite launch?” asked Ujjal. “That isn’t wise. If we skip the testing, some flaw I haven’t discovered yet could force a recall.”
“I am absolutely certain that will not happen,” said Vitalius.
“But that’s the point! You can’t be absolutely certain…”
“Enough!” Vitalius barked. “You have your instructions, and I expect you to carry them out to the letter. Or do I have to have you escorted from the building right now?”
I knew what the result of that would be. If Ujjal was fired, it wouldn’t be long before I was asked to go looking for him. He didn’t know that, but from behind our employer’s shoulder, I shook my head No at the engineer as fervently as I could manage.
Ujjal stared at Vitalius, as if only now and for the first time realizing that his employer was not an honorable individual. He made a sound of disgust and left the room without another word.
“That went well,” said our boss. He turned in my direction and patted me on the shoulder paternally. “Let’s go downstairs. I get the feeling I’m not as welcome up here as I’d like to be. Heavy is the head that wears the crown!”
“Sure thing,” I said.
“And one more thing,” said Vitalius. “I’d like you to share a drink with me tonight. Come by after dinner. Yes?”
“Of course.”
“That’s a good man.”
Chapter 35
I had dinner in the cafeteria that night. Saag Paneer was on the menu, little cubes of Indian cheese in a spinach sauce.
“Why would a Mongolian monk eat so much Indian food?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question because I had never actually seen the Ja Lama eating any of it even though the cafeteria menu was supposedly created in his honor. Kumar answered me
anyway.
“I’m pretty sure the only thing they have to eat in Mongolia is meat.”
“So he’s basically just fucking with us.”
“Don’t knock it,” said Kumar. “I love Indian food. To tell you the truth, though, I don’t know if I’ll ever eat it again if I get out… I mean, when I… never mind.”
We both knew he might never make it out of here alive. That didn’t mean he felt like talking about it. The person who had been sitting with us got up and left, returning to his work on one of the Quod Corporation’s secret projects. I leaned in closer to Kumar.
“Listen up,” I said quietly while slipping him a key drive as discreetly as possible. “I need you to copy anything you can from the satellite project and give it to me.”
“I’m not sure my people would…”
“I talked to your people just last night. It’s okay, Kumar. We’re working together.”
“Who did you talk with?” he asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know her name, she had a mask on. But I caught a glimpse of her face under her mask, and she looked like a black woman.”
He looked confused at first, then nodded. “Okay, I think I know who you’re talking about. She’s half Japanese and half American, but her father was a black guy. I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”
“I’m not investigating your crew. And I’m never going to. I only care about one thing.”
“Okay, Gavin. Okay.”
“Gotta go,” I said. “The boss is waiting for me.” I stood up with my tray.
“He asks you to meet with him a lot,” said Kumar. Half suspicious, half nervous.
“Yeah, well, he likes to get drunk with me,” I said.
I could tell from the look on his face that this didn’t make him feel any better.
“Try to guess what my new obsession is,” said Vitalius. He poured me a huge glass of Shiraz and gestured for me to sit down, so I did. I was starting to think I was perfectly safe here because Vitalius wouldn’t have anyone to hold his drunken lectures with if he ever killed me.
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