by Kyle Mills
He finally pulled away from the camera and shut it down, but the recorded images stayed trapped in his mind. They would be added to the others, he knew. The ones he couldn’t escape.
2
Las Vegas, Nevada
USA
Jon Smith made his way through the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center toward a dense knot of people at its heart. The air-conditioning was already drying the sweat that had soaked through the back of his shirt while he was stuck standing in the desert sun. It had never occurred to him that security for the function would be so tight — metal detectors, multiple ID checks, bomb-sniffing dogs. By comparison, the TSA and Secret Service were downright easygoing.
When he reached the crowd, the reason for the over-the-top scrutiny became apparent. It seemed to consist of a Who’s Who of the tech industry. He spotted familiar faces from Amazon and Facebook right away. The new CEO of Apple was also there, embroiled in a heated discussion with two gangly young men he didn’t recognize but whose presence and spectacular basketball shoes suggested they were probably worth a billion dollars each.
Feeling more than a little out of place, Smith skirted the crowd’s edge, examining the hundred or so chairs lined up in front of a stage framed by a twenty-meter-high video monitor. Finally, he reached his objective: an enormous table straining under the weight of an impressive ice sculpture and an even more impressive spread of exotic food items.
His first sample turned out to be a deeply unfortunate combination of dates and caviar, so he headed toward the bar to get something to wash the taste from his mouth.
“Beer,” he said to one of the men handling a line of taps that must have been ten meters long.
“My pleasure. We have Fat Tire, Snake River Lager, Sam Adams, Corona—”
Smith held a hand up, certain the man could recite them all but concerned that the flavor of those dates was starting to gain a permanent foothold. “I’ll trust your judgment.”
The voice of a woman behind him rose above the drone of the crowd. “You look like a Budweiser man to me.”
He turned and she planted herself in front of him, red lips crossing pale skin in a broad grin. Mid-twenties, thin but shapely, with a pixie haircut and bangs that she pushed from her eyes to get a better look at him. Her name tag read “Janine Redford/Wired Magazine.” His, as she had undoubtedly noticed, just read “Jon Smith.”
“I’ve been watching you.”
“Me?” he said, accepting the beer and then pushing back through the people mobbing the bar with her in his wake. “Why? I’m not anybody.”
She pointed at his name tag. “And you’re not afraid to put it in writing.”
“Family name. Could have been worse. My father had a falling-out with my uncle Gomer right before I was born.”
She seemed unconvinced. “I either know or recognize everyone here. You don’t seem to fit.”
“No?”
“No. You’ve got your geeks, your scary business powerhouses, and your skinny, middle-aged Internet gazillionaires…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “Then there’s you.”
There was no denying it. His shoulders were a bit too broad, his black hair a little too utilitarian, and his dark skin starting to show damage from sun, wind, ice, and the occasional unavoidable explosion.
“Maybe they sent my invitation by accident?” he said honestly. At this point, it was actually his most credible theory. But why look a gift horse in the mouth? A good quarter of the world would have cut off their pinkie toe to be here. And he was firmly in that twenty-five percent.
She gave him a suspicious little smile and took a sip from her martini glass. “Christian Dresner doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Okay. Then you tell me why I’m here.”
“You’re military.”
“I’m a doctor,” he said evasively. “Microbiology. But these days I work with the physically impaired.”
“Okay. I’ll buy that. But you’re a military doctor and the impaired people you work with are injured soldiers. No point in denying it. I’m a prodigy at this.”
He considered his options for a moment but then just stuck out his hand. “Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith.”
“So does the military know something?” she said, demonstrating a surprisingly firm grip. “Like, for instance, what Dresner’s going to roll out today?”
“Not a clue.”
Her pouting frown combined with the sagging of her shoulders made it clear she wasn’t buying a word he said. When she spoke again, he wasn’t sure if it was to him or if she was just thinking out loud. “Dresner’s more of a save-the-world kind of guy than a blow-up-the-world guy…”
“And I don’t work with weapons, Janine. I really am a doctor. If I’m not here by mistake, my best guess is it’s another medical breakthrough. His antibiotics have been really important to us on the battlefield, and retired soldiers are a huge market for his hearing system.”
She crinkled up her nose. “My grandpa was an artillery guy in Vietnam and he has one of those hearing aids.”
“It’s an amazing technology.”
“Yeah. I used to shout ‘Hi, Gramps!’ right in his face and he’d say, ‘Oh, about eleven o’clock.’ Now he can hear a pin drop in the next room.”
People often made the mistake of comparing Dresner’s system to Cochlears, but the technology was an order of magnitude more advanced. Dresner had figured out a way to bypass the ear entirely, using a magnetic field to communicate directly with the brain. Children being born today would never even understand the concept of hearing impairment.
She pointed to the left side of her head. “The problem is that he’s bald and he’s got these two shiny silver receivers screwed right into his wrinkly old skull. I love the guy, but it’s disgusting.”
“You know the VA will pay to have those painted to match his skin.”
“He says the government has better things to do with its money than try to make him look pretty.”
Smith raised his glass to the old soldier and took a long pull.
“I think we can both agree that it’s not going to be better hearing aids,” she continued. “So what then?”
“I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you what I hope it is. I’ve been working on developing prosthetics for injured troops and we’ve made some strides toward allowing people to control them mentally, but the technology is really basic. If there’s anyone in the world who could crack that nut, it would be Christian Dresner.”
Her eyes crinkled up as she considered the possibility. “We did a story a while back on a monkey that controls this huge mechanical arm with his brain. Doesn’t seem to understand it’s not his. Creepy.”
“I’ve actually met that monkey,” Smith said. “And it is kind of creepy.”
She shook her head. “It’s not going to be that.”
“No? Why not?”
“First of all, because you’re the only doctor here — everyone else is straight-up technology. And second, because a few years back Dresner overpaid for a Spanish search start-up that was doing augmented reality for cell phones.”
“Like the astronomy app I have on my iPhone? You just hold it up to the sky at night and it shows you the stars behind it with their names. I love that.”
She seemed less impressed. “Dresner didn’t want the company. He wanted their technology guru. An old hacker named Javier de Galdiano.”
“And what’s de Galdiano do now?”
“No one really knows. What I do know, though, is that Dresner’s bought up more than a few hardware companies and patents that would be complementary to what Javier was trying to accomplish at his start-up.”
“You know a lot.”
“Keeping tabs on what Dresner is doing is pretty much my job. And I’m saying he’s getting into computing.”
“Seems like a pretty saturated market. These days everything is just a bigger, smaller, or lighter version of something that already exists. Steve Jobs was amazing at taking existing technology a
nd making it useful, but I see Dresner more as someone who’s looking to blow people away with something they’ve never even thought about before. I mean, the guy’s completely changed our understanding of how the mind and body communicate. His work in immunology has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and headed off a health disaster that I guarantee was coming. I can’t help thinking this is going to be something…amazing.”
She hooked an arm through his and tugged him toward the people moving to the seating in front of the stage. “Then let’s push through all these geeks and get you into the front row. Maybe we could sit together? I’d feel safer having a military man close. You know, in case the Russians invade.”
He grinned and responded in that language as they tried to do an end run around one of Google’s founders.
“I’m intrigued. What did you say?”
In fact, it was an old proverb about the benefits of beautiful young women, but he decided to equivocate a bit.
“I said, ‘Can you give me directions to the bathroom?’ It’s the only Russian I know.”
“Still, you sold it. And that’s what’s important.”
3
Khost Province
Afghanistan
What the hell happened down there?”
Randi Russell swept the helicopter over the village at about 120 meters, passing through the haze created by still-smoldering buildings. She kept her attention on the controls and let the redheaded soldier next to her survey the scene through a set of binoculars. It would have been more practical to just come in lower, but there was a stiff wind blowing upcanyon and she was admittedly not the best pilot in Afghanistan. Truth be told, she might not have been the best pilot at your average Cub Scout meeting.
“What are you seeing, Deuce?”
“Weird shit — so, basically, the same thing I see every day. I vote we head back to base, get a drink, and forget all about this. It’s almost happy hour.”
Randi risked a look down at the bodies strewn across the sand and the bizarre blooms of blood growing from the tops of about half. Weird shit? Definitely. But not your everyday weird shit.
“I’d like to get a closer look.”
The man turned toward her, alarm visible on his face. “Whoa now, girl. You’re not going to try to fly low, are you?”
She gave him a withering glance. “I was thinking more about landing.”
“Come on, Randi. There’s not so much as a lizard alive down there and those canyon walls are sniper heaven. Happy hour. I’m buying.”
“When did you turn into such an old lady?”
In truth, Lieutenant Deuce Brennan was one of the most talented special forces operatives the U.S. military had ever turned out. She’d been unimpressed by his Howdy Doody looks and frat-boy demeanor when he’d arrived in country, but now used every excuse in the book to make sure he was the one watching her back.
“Look, I love you, Randi. You know I do. You’ve given me a whole new respect for you useless CIA types. But I’d like to leave here with all my body parts intact one day. And the longer I know you, the less likely that seems.”
“Five minutes,” she said, slowing to a hover and easing back the power. “Then the margaritas are on me.”
It wasn’t a bad landing by her standards, though some of the credit went to the soft sand. They jumped out immediately, a bit of an odd couple with him in full combat gear and her in khaki cargo pants and a matching T-shirt.
A scarf hid the short blond hair that made her stand out so badly in this part of the world, and she reached up to make sure none was peeking out as Deuce moved north. His eyes swept smoothly across the shadows thrown by the burned-out buildings that yesterday had been a thriving village mildly sympathetic to America’s fading occupation.
Confident that she was covered, Randi started toward the body of a young woman and crouched for a moment, examining the bullet wound in her chest and the fear still frozen into her face.
The next corpse was ten meters away and was an example of what had interested her so much from the air. There was a similar bullet wound in the chest, but the body had been decapitated and in place of the head was a circle of sand stained black by blood.
She moved from body to body, finally drawing her Beretta when she found herself among the blackened buildings. Deuce was visible about a hundred meters away and gave her the thumbs-up. Obviously, he was finding the same thing she was. Death.
Randi ducked through the door of a tiny cube of a house, holding her breath against the stench of burned human flesh and finding two charred bodies in the still-glowing embers. Both had managed to keep their heads and, judging by their size, both were children.
She reemerged into the fresh air and sunlight, continuing her search but finding no break in the pattern. No weapons. Decapitated men. Intact women and children.
She’d been sent there by Fred Klein to investigate what he had characterized — with customary vagueness — as “suspicious mercenary activity.”
She saw no evidence of that, though. The attackers had worn traditional local footwear and there were visible gouges from horse hooves — hardly standard merc gear.
That wasn’t to say that this was the result of one of the normal rival village skirmishes that had been going on in the area for a thousand years. Beyond the bizarre decapitations, she couldn’t make sense of the story told by the tracks of the village’s male casualties. A few seemed to have run a short distance but not at the full sprint warranted by the situation. And none showed any evidence that they’d tried to defend themselves or their families. How was that possible for a people who had slapped around everyone from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union?
A quiet crunch became audible to her right. She spun smoothly, bringing her pistol level with the sound.
“Don’t shoot! It’s me,” Deuce said, appearing from around a mud wall.
She holstered her weapon. “Anything?”
“They must have been taken by surprise,” he said with a shake of the head. “Whoever took them out also made off with their weapons and hauled away any of their own casualties. That is, if there were any. I can’t find any unaccounted-for blood or footprints of attackers that look like they took a hit.”
“You find the heads?”
“Nope.”
She let out a long breath and shaded her eyes from the sun sinking in the west. She’d known these people. In fact, she’d convinced the agency to fund a project to get them clean water. They were good Muslims, but had no love for the Taliban.
“Hard to believe that they’d get caught flat-footed like this,” Deuce said.
“Impossible to believe. They were good fighters and they knew damn well they had enemies — some that go back hundreds of years and some new ones who know they sided with us a few times. There’s no way in hell someone just rolled in here and wiped them out.”
“Looks to me like that’s exactly what happened.”
A gunshot sounded and she ducked involuntarily, drawing her weapon and listening to the clang of a round hitting metal.
“Shit!” Deuce said. “It’s coming from the south wall of the canyon. They’re going for the helicopter!”
Randi slid her back against the sooty building as more shots rang out. The wind was picking up and the sniper could only manage a hit every two or three times but the chopper was pretty much devoid of armor. One lucky hit and they’d have to decide between the humiliation of calling in a rescue and a long, dangerous walk home.
She came to the edge of her cover and strolled across a dirt track to a wall on the other side. The deliberately slow pace had its intended effect and she saw a round kick up dust a meter or so to her right. Hopefully, the sniper would forget about the chopper now that he knew flesh-and-blood targets were on the menu.
“I’m guessing that guy has friends,” Deuce shouted. He fired off a volley in the general direction of their attacker, but his weapon wasn’t designed for that kind of range. “Word’s gonna get out about our
visit pretty quick.”
Randi pointed at a headless body about halfway between them and the helicopter. “We’ll go on my mark. But on the way, we’re picking up that body. I want an autopsy.”
“An autopsy?” Deuce said incredulously. “I mean, I don’t have a medical degree or anything, but I’m pretty sure the cause of death was the bullet in his chest or the fact that his freakin’ head is gone!”
“I didn’t come all this way to leave empty-handed.”
He fired a few additional rounds, more out of frustration than from any hope they would dissuade the sniper trying to zero in on them. “I swear, Randi. Someday, when no one is looking, I’m gonna kill you myself.”
4
Las Vegas, Nevada
USA
True to her word, Janine had gotten them seats four rows from the front. She had a natural pushiness that, combined with her youth and beauty, tended to part a crowd pretty well.
“I wonder if he finally got new glasses,” Janine said, putting her hand on Smith’s forearm. “We have a pool at the office and it’s up to more than five hundred bucks.”
Her question was answered a moment later when Christian Dresner strode onto stage and stalked toward the lone lectern at its center. The Coke-bottle glasses he’d been wearing since the eighties were still there, as were the suit and tie that he seemed to have bought around the same time.
The truth was that Dresner looked as out of place as Smith did in this crowd. Not only the clothes, but the graying blond hair worn in such a shaggy, haphazard style that many people believed he cut it himself. In Smith’s mind, though, everything seemed carefully calculated to diminish the almost cartoonishly square jaw, the heavy shoulders, and the still-narrow waist. With contacts, a decent tailor, and a coupon to Supercuts he would look like a spectacularly successful Nazi eugenics project.
A light applause erupted and Dresner seemed a little uncomfortable, losing himself for a moment in securing a Bluetooth headset to his ear. In fact, this was only the fourth public appearance in the notoriously shy genius’s career.
